Belonging (25 page)

Tucking his arms under his head, he opened
his other eye and offered, "Whiskers?"

Neither Kim nor Casey looked thrilled. "Try
again," she told him.

"Duke?"

"That's no name for a girl!" Kim looked
disgusted. Matt chuckled and rattled off several more names, each
one more ridiculous than the last. Finally Casey piped up, "How
about Patches?"

This time it was Matt and Angie who looked at
each other. The pup's fur was coal-black, unmarked by even a single
patch of any other color. Fighting to suppress a smile, Angie
started to point that out to Casey, but by now Kim had spoken up as
well. "Yeah," she said excitedly. "Let's call her Patches!"

Angie promptly closed her mouth. With the two
girls in agreement for once, she wasn't about to make any more
waves. "Patches it is, then," she confirmed. Even the pup seemed to
like it, jumping up and yapping excitedly.

Once again the girls ran around the yard,
with the pup chasing them. Matt even joined in the game, but oddly
enough, Patches tired out before the rest of them. The girls went
into the house then and took the dog with them.

Angie raised an eyebrow when Matt dropped
beside her once more. "Who did you really buy the puppy for?" she
asked knowingly. "You or the girls?"

He grinned. "Come to think of it, I always
did want a cocker spaniel when I was a kid."

"And that's why her bed is in my utility
room?"

"I'd like to see you try to get that dog away
from those kids." He looked rather smug.

"I couldn't and you know it." She frowned
good- naturedly. "And I think you knew that when you steered us
away from the kittens and parakeets toward this little pooch."

He pillowed his hands behind his head.
"Guilty as charged."

A comfortable silence settled between them.
Angie leaned back against the tree trunk, her eyes drawn to Matt as
if by some force she couldn't control. A faint breeze feathered his
dark hair across his forehead. His eyes were closed, bristly lashes
fanning out against the high sweep of his cheekbones. Her
fingertips began to tingle. She wished she had the courage to lean
over, to trace the arresting configuration of his features—-across
the tanned lines of his forehead to the stubborn angle of his jaw,
along the jutting blade of his nose to that beautifully curved
masculine mouth.

She wasn't prepared for the tide of feelings
that rose inside her. She was attracted to Matt. There was little
point in denying it. But this painfully sweet emotion that tugged
at her heart was more than sexual attraction--much more.

"Angie?"

She realized he had opened his eyes and was
staring at her. His mouth looked both hard and soft, readily
inviting. He didn't bother to hide the spark of desire in his eyes,
but it was tempered, restrained, an effort she knew he made solely
on her behalf. Yet it was his voice—that quietly tender voice she
was already so familiar with—that shook her to her very core. She
tore her eyes away. She didn't want to remember his gentleness.

"It just occurred to me—" even to her own
ears, her voice sounded high-pitched and strained "—that you've
never talked much about yourself." She took a deep breath and
stared straight ahead, trying to garner her control. Dragging her
knees up to her chest, she wrapped her arms around them. "Your
family...is there anyone back in Chicago?"

He was silent so long she thought he hadn't
heard her. She glanced over at him. His gaze was fixed on some
distant point high in the sky.

He suddenly seemed a million miles away.
"Matt?" She almost hated to disturb him.

The sound of his name seemed to rouse him. He
raised himself to a sitting position, carefully respecting the
small distance she'd put between them earlier.

"No," he said quietly. "No family." He
appeared to hesitate. "Not in Chicago or anywhere else."

Angie frowned. "But you mentioned your mother
this morning." Too late she realized the path her statement led
down. When Matt began to shake his head, she asked tentatively.
"She's gone?"

He nodded. Angie waited for him to speak
further, sensing that for once the tables were turned. That it was
he who harbored secrets, he who held so much inside.

He suddenly looked older, and very tired.

The silence drifted between them, and Angie
realized how much she wanted him to talk to her, how much she
wanted to ease whatever had caused that somber, faraway look to
settle in his eyes. Was this how Matt felt when she refused to talk
to him about Evan? The thought had no sooner chased through her
mind than she heard his voice.

"I had a brother once," he said softly, so
softly she had to strain to hear.

"Did you?"

Pale streamers of light trickled through the
tree branches, bathing his strong features in a kind of golden glow
as he nodded. "Michael." A sad, wistful smile touched his lips.
"His name was Michael."

Slowly, in bits and pieces, the story emerged
of two brothers, raised in a tenement on Chicago's South Side by a
mother whose husband had left one morning never to return.

It had been a struggle for survival.

"We never had enough money." He rested an arm
on his knee as he spoke. "My mother did what she could." He
shrugged, a silently eloquent gesture. "She had a lot of dreams for
Mike, though, and I thought I could help, too. I got a job driving
a delivery truck right out of high school. The only trouble was..."
He paused, and she had the feeling he didn't really want to
continue.

"Yes?" Her eyes encouraged him.

His face hardened. His mouth tightened into a
thin line. "Neither my mother nor I were home much. Mike got in
with a bad crowd." The hand resting on his knee tightened into a
white-knuckled grip. "He was killed in a gang war when he was
fifteen. My mother died three months later."

Of a broken heart. Angie's eyes closed. She
didn't have to hear the words aloud to sense what Matt was feeling.
She looked at him then and knew by the starkly rigid lines of his
profile the battle he was exerting over his emotions.

There was a hollow sensation in her chest.
She had never thought of Matt as vulnerable, yet he was a man who
had been alone most of his life. A man who had reached out to
her...

As if it were the most natural thing in the
world, she bridged the small distance between them and laid her
hand on his. It was a simple, consoling gesture, one she made
without really being aware of it. She was reaching out to him.

Matt stared down at the small hand lying so
trustingly, so comfortingly, atop his where it rested on his
jean-clad thigh. His heart seemed to swell inside his chest with
the powerful emotion that seized him. At last, he thought to
himself, only barely able to believe it. At last, she's starting to
see how it is between us.

"I'm sorry," she whispered, not knowing what
else to say. "It seems so unfair for you to have had so little,
and then to lose what little there was."

He was quiet for a few seconds. "I suppose it
makes you appreciate what you do have."

"And reminds you what you don't," she said
with a small sigh.

"True," he agreed, thinking of the two of
them at this very moment. They were so close, yet there was still
such a distance to bridge.

"I'm glad you told me," she found herself
confessing. "I wish things could have been different for you,
Matt."

His face softened as he gently turned his
hand in hers and laced their fingers together. Their eyes melded.
The emotion he saw reflected in those sapphire-blue depths stole
his breath. For a heart-stopping moment he said nothing.

Then he brought her hand to his lips. "I'm
not so sure I'd have changed anything even if I could," he told her
huskily. "Because otherwise I might not be here with you right
now." His lips sought the sensitive skin on the inside of her
wrist. "My angel," he murmured. "My sweet, loving angel."

Angie froze.

"The girls," she mumbled, feeling deathly
sick. "I'd better check on the girls."

As she jumped to her feet, Matt caught at her
hand and followed her up. "Angie. Angie, what the hell. What did I
say? What did I do?"

She hated herself for the confusion she heard
in his voice. Time hung suspended for a tense, never-ending moment
as she stared at him, her features pale and colorless.

"I'm sorry, Matt," she choked out. Her hands
shook so badly she clasped them in front of her to still their
trembling. The words came out choppy and disjointed. "I don't mean
to hurt you. Don't you see, it's not you... it's him! Him!"

And by him she meant Evan.

Matt's shoulders slumped. He had no way of
knowing that his own face looked as if it had been etched in
stone. As Angie turned from him and ran, powerful but conflicting
emotions surged deep inside him. Anger. Hurt. Frustration.

But strongest of all was the undeniable
certainty that he had made a mistake—a mistake that would cost him
dearly.

***

Twenty-four hours later he still felt as if
he were caught somewhere between heaven and hell. It was sweet
agony to be near her but unable to touch her.

Angel... My sweet, loving angel
...
Because of something he'd inadvertently said, because of Evan, they
were back where they had started. Even worse, Matt reflected
testily on Sunday evening. Angie was more frigidly polite than ever
before. It was a situation he was convinced would have tried the
patience of a saint.

It was a good thing he had never aspired to
such a lofty existence--he definitely wouldn't have made it.

Why did she stand so proud and aloof? What
fueled her determination to keep him at a distance? Both were
questions that nagged at him with such relentless persistence that
he could think of little else.

The burnt child dreads the fire. He
remembered the night he had said that to her. She had admitted she
was afraid to let herself give in, to let herself love again. God
knew it was still true. But not, he suspected, for the reasons he'd
thought.

More and more, Matt was beginning to think
there was more than just the memory of her husband standing
between them. But what? What? Angie held the key.

But Angie wasn't talking.

He leaned his head back against the sofa
wearily, pondering the situation and wondering what, if anything,
he could do to change it. He'd been struggling with himself all day
long. He felt oddly out of step, unsure of which way to turn. One
minute he was determined to demand that Angie confide in him, once
and for all. The next he fought the urge to pull her into his arms
and whisper that it didn't matter. Her secrets could remain hers—as
long as nothing kept them apart.

But something was keeping them apart, and
that was the whole damn problem. With a heavy sigh he got up and
wandered around the living room.

They had spent most of the afternoon at the
Craw- fords, and he was glad for the opportunity to get her out of
the house and get her mind off the letter she'd received Friday.
After dinner they'd watched some of the home movies Bill had taken
of both families. Angie had casually mentioned that somewhere at
home she had a boxful of films taken when Kim and Casey were
younger.

Matt wasn't surprised; Angie was the type of
doting mother to catalog every stage of her children's
development, both significant and insignificant. There were dozens
of pictures, studio portraits and informal snapshots alike, crowded
on one wall of her den. Atop the end table near the sofa were
bronzed baby shoes. Just yesterday Casey had proudly pulled out her
baby album and displayed footprints, handprints, even a lock of
hair snipped when she was a year old.

Suddenly Matt stood stock-still. He sucked in
a harsh breath of air, every nerve in his body tightened to an
almost painful pitch of awareness.

Sentimental Angie. This time the words mocked
him. He turned slowly, his eyes moving carefully around the room.
All of a sudden he realized there was something conspicuously
absent in Angie's home.

There were no reminders—absolutely none—of
the man who had once been her husband. No wedding pictures or
albums, no small mementos of a love once treasured...

More than ever, Matt was certain that
something wasn't right.

***

Two very long baths and three bedtime stories
later, it was time to head downstairs and face Matt. Lovingly,
Angie tucked the blanket beneath Casey's chin. She reached over and
smoothed the tumbled curls off Kim's forehead. Both were sleeping
peacefully.

Moving noiselessly to the bedroom door, she
realized there was no point in delaying it any longer. She had
dreaded being alone with him all day. The tension between them had
eased somewhat while they were at Janice and Bill's, but there had
been several times today when she had glanced up to find him
watching her with a dark, analytical stare that was unnerving. She
wished she had some idea what was going on in his head, but his
expression gave nothing away.

That same prickly sense of unease gripped her
once more as she paused near the entrance of the living room.
Darkness had fallen. The room was lit only by a hazy path of
moonlight that crept in through the windows.

She could see Matt in silhouette standing
near the fireplace, his hands thrust into the pockets of his
slacks. As if sensing her scrutiny, he slowly turned, his face all
planes and shadows. Her heart thundered in her chest as she
hurriedly switched on a light. The tension in the air was almost
palpable.

Matt finally extended his hand. "Come here,"
he invited softly.

Angie swallowed. Certainly there was nothing
threatening in either his tone or his manner, yet as she moved
slowly across the room, she felt as if she was heading straight
into a minefield.