Flowers on Main (38 page)

“Okay, I’ll make nice with the Johnsons. Anything else?”

Calmer now, she perched on the edge of his desk. “Tell me about your evening with Bree. How’d that go?”

“It was interesting.” He searched for a better word. “Unexpected.”

She looked intrigued. “Really? How so?”

“I don’t have time to get into it right now. She’s coming over for dinner in less than an hour. I need a shower and I need groceries.”

“I’ll buy the groceries and drop them off if you’ll take two seconds to tell me why the evening was so interesting.”

“I think she’s going to open a regional theater here,” he said, then pressed a kiss to her forehead and two twenties into her hand. “Steaks, wine and something chocolate for dessert, okay? And you need to get it to my house and vanish before she arrives at seven.”

“But I want more details,” she called after him.

“Tomorrow,” he promised.

Apparently his promise wasn’t enough to suit Connie, because by the time he’d taken his shower and dressed, he found her in the kitchen with Bree having a heart-to-heart exchange about the date that wasn’t a date. They shut up the instant Bree spotted him.

“Spilling all our secrets to my sister?” he asked.

Bree gave him an impudent look. “We don’t have any secrets, at least not any really juicy ones.”

“More’s the pity,” he commented and popped the top off a beer. He leaned against the counter and gave Connie a pointed look. “Don’t you have someplace you need to be?”

She grinned. “Bree asked me to stay.”

Jake scowled. “Did she now?” He met Bree’s guilty gaze. “I wonder why. Second thoughts, perhaps?”

“Second thoughts about what?” Connie asked, then gasped. “Oh, right. Gee, thanks for asking, Bree, but I should get home. Jenny’s probably waiting for dinner.”

Jake gave her a satisfied look. “Enjoy your evening. I’ll make that call to the Johnsons in a little while.”

“Thanks,” Connie said, giving Bree a peck on the cheek and him a conspiratorial wink.

As soon as the kitchen door closed, Bree met his gaze. “You didn’t, by any chance, invite me over here with an ulterior motive, did you?”

He regarded her with an unblinking look. “Yes, I did.”

She returned his look, then nodded slowly. “Then you’d better feed me first.”

Well, well, well, Jake thought. His plans for the evening were definitely looking up.

From the moment Jake had all but tossed his sister out the door, Bree’s senses had been in a state of high anticipation. She went through the motions of helping him to get their meal on the table. She scrubbed a couple of potatoes and put them in the microwave, tossed a salad and set the table, while Jake was outside cooking the steaks on the grill. When he came back in, they sat down opposite each other. He poured the wine, then met her gaze.

“Mind if I offer a toast to us?” he asked.

Unable to look away from the intensity of his gaze, she merely shook her head.

“To whatever the future holds,” he said, then touched his glass to hers.

“To the future,” she murmured, wondering why it sud
denly looked so promising after weeks—no,
months—
of uncertainty.

They managed to make small talk as they ate for about fifteen minutes, but then Jake pushed his plate away. “Food’s the last thing on my mind,” he admitted to her.

Bree nodded. “I’m having a little trouble concentrating on my meal myself.”

His eyes glittering, he warned, “If we stand up from this table, you know what’s going to happen next, don’t you, Bree? There’s still time for you to tell me no.”

“I’m not going to say no,” she said, shoving back her chair and standing to prove the point.

That was apparently enough of an invitation for him. Jake was around the table in a heartbeat. His work-roughened hands, the hands of a real man, framed her face with such tenderness it made her want to cry.

“I love you,” he said solemnly. “Always have, always will.”

“Back at you,” she said, trembling with need. “If you don’t kiss me soon, I think my knees are going to buckle.”

He grinned. “We can’t have that, now, can we?” he said as he scooped her into his arms and cradled her to his chest. “I think we need to hold off on the kissing until we make it to the bedroom. Otherwise, I’ll have to break all these dishes getting them off the kitchen table to make room for us right here.”

“Hurry,” she whispered, her hand on his cheek. Though he’d showered and washed his hair, there was still a faint stubble on his cheeks. She loved the way it felt to her touch. Jake was one of those men who looked even sexier at the end of the day than he did when he was clean shaven in the morning. She loved the masculine textures of him…his cheeks, his hands, the dark hair on his bronzed chest.

She was so absorbed by all the familiar yet excitingly new
sensations he stirred in her that she barely noticed anything about his house or his room as he took her down the hallway, then lowered her to the king-size bed with its fresh-from-the-laundry sheets still smelling of sunshine.

“You hung these sheets outside, didn’t you?” she asked, surprised and delighted.

“It’s a pain, but they smell better,” he admitted. “It’s the way my mother always did them.” Laughter glinted in his eyes. “Are we really going to discuss my laundry techniques?”

“Just until you come up with a more fascinating alternative,” she said.

“How about we don’t talk at all?” he suggested, lowering his mouth to cover hers.

That suited Bree. She lost herself to the kiss, to the magical caresses that were setting her skin on fire, to the rising tide building to a crest inside her.

Jake made love the way he did everything else, with total concentration and confidence. She’d forgotten how treasured she’d always felt with him, as if there was something astonishing about every single inch of her, as if he’d never tire of learning all her secrets.

For all of their rush to get into the bedroom, he seemed more than willing to take his time now, lingering over a kiss, savoring the taste of her skin, taunting her until she was ready to beg him to stop, then plead for him to go on.

She remembered with absolute clarity why she’d been so sure they belonged together. It was this, the perfection of their intimacy, the way Jake gave her everything, the way he exulted in what she gave back. Together they soared.

Even as the last shuddering waves of a climax died down, Bree wanted more. She wanted moments like this again and again, enough to fill a lifetime.

But as she glanced across the room and spotted the first few chapters of her book tossed on the dresser, nearly hidden by a pile of laundry, she wondered if they could have it all without really dealing with the past. And that half-buried manuscript told her that Jake still hadn’t dealt with it at all.

J
ake saw the suddenly dulled expression on Bree’s face and followed her gaze to see what had put it there. He spotted the manuscript almost immediately, even as she rolled away from him and tugged the sheet more tightly around her.

“You haven’t read it, have you?” she asked, her tone condemning.

After all the heat they’d just shared, it was like having ice water tossed over him. “No,” he admitted. He’d taken it out of the drawer in which he’d hidden it, but had been unable to make himself read so much as a word.

“Why? You were the one who said you wanted to in the first place and I’ve told you repeatedly how important it is to me.”

“I told you I wanted to before I realized you were dissecting our past,” he said irritably. “I lived it. I don’t need to read about it.”

“Then you should have had the guts to tell me that to my face.”

Jake sighed. “Yes, I should have, but you and I haven’t exactly been in step since you got back.”

“What the hell were we a few minutes ago?”

“Where we probably should have been weeks ago,” he
conceded. “Maybe then everything would have made more sense.”

“Sex doesn’t resolve anything, you know that,” she said with exasperation.

“No, but it does clarify what’s worth fighting for, don’t you think?”

“I suppose.” She looked directly into his eyes. “Jake, I get why the idea of reading this manuscript bothers you, but I’m telling you it’s important. You didn’t live what happened from my point of view. Don’t you care, at least a little, about what I was feeling?”

“Sure, I care. I cared back then, but you weren’t willing to share your feelings with me. You shut them off, shut me out and ran away.”

She flinched at the accusation, but didn’t deny it. “That’s true,” she conceded. “Did you ever stop to think that maybe it was too painful for me to face any of it? That the only way I could handle what happened was by locking it all up inside and running?”

Jake hesitated. The emotion in her eyes was raw enough he couldn’t help believing her and yet…and yet she
had
taken off. That was something he wasn’t sure he’d ever get over. They should have dealt with their loss together. What did it say about their relationship that she couldn’t face it with him? She’d gone off alone, a pattern she’d apparently established in childhood. It had made him feel as if he didn’t matter to her at all, as if she didn’t trust him not to judge her for feeling relief along with all the other emotions.

She reached over and touched the tensed muscle in his arm. “Please, Jake. Read it. Do it now. You need to understand the way it was for me. I don’t see how we can get past it if you don’t understand that.”

“Not five minutes ago, we were getting past it pretty damn well.”

“Never the problem,” she reminded him succinctly.

He regarded her with frustration. “You’re not going to let this go, are you?”

She held his gaze. “No. Not when I believe our future depends on it.”

“Okay, fine,” he said reluctantly. He crossed the room and grabbed the hundred or so pages she’d given him. “Is this it or have you written more by now?”

“There’s more, but this is the most relevant part. Keep in mind, even though it’s fiction, the emotions are real. They’re mine.”

He turned on the bedside lamp and pulled the sheet up to his waist, then started to read. The story began simply enough, drawing him in, making the characters—strangers, not him and Bree at all—come alive. She’d always had a knack for that, one he’d admired. The differences between them and these people she was writing about allowed him to go on, in fact drew him in and made him care.

Next to him, Bree barely moved, but he could hear the occasional catch in her breath, as if she was anticipating where he was in the story and waiting for his reaction. He tried to keep his expression neutral, his concentration focused on the words on the page.

An hour or more later as he neared the end, he wanted to stop. Even through these fictional characters, she was making him feel everything all over again and he didn’t want to go there. Yet, she was right. He had to.
They
had to. He read on:

The worst part of that awful day was looking into Jeremy’s eyes and seeing the depth of his grief. How could I bear that
when for me there was this sense of freedom, knowing that I could live my life the way I’d envisioned it? For me, the baby had never seemed real, even though it had been growing inside me. I think I’d deliberately turned off my emotions, because if I’d faced them, if I’d allowed myself to feel anything for our child, I would be forever trapped in a life—not that I didn’t want, because I did—but a life I wasn’t ready for.

And yet, the raw pain written on Jeremy’s face made me ache for him, for what he’d lost. I felt as if I’d failed him, failed our child.

And so I left, ran to the life I thought I wanted, thought I needed, only to discover that the answers for me weren’t there. They were back home with the man who loved me unconditionally, with the child who’d never had a chance to live at all. I lost more than I realized that awful day. I had to grow up to discover it. I had to let myself feel a mother’s anguish at losing a child.

And when I did, at last, I wept for what could have—what
should
have—been.

Jake read the last page of that early chapter, his eyes stinging. She’d forced him to see that it had simply taken her longer to deal with what happened, longer to feel what he’d felt. That didn’t make her wrong and him right. It was simply the way it was. How could he judge her for that? How could he hate her for handling things the only way she knew how? Did he really want her to have suffered the way he had? In fact, maybe her way had been harder in the long run because she’d spent years getting to this point, years battling guilt along with everything else.

When he could control his voice, he faced her. “I shouldn’t have judged you.”

She shook her head. “You had every right to. We should
have handled it together. You wanted to. You tried, but I shut you out, not just after the miscarriage, but even before, from the moment I knew I was pregnant. I was so angry at you, even though I knew we were both responsible. I blamed you for ruining everything.”

“I blamed myself,” he admitted for the first time. “I knew how badly you wanted to leave here, how much that internship in Chicago meant. Yet when we found out about the baby, all I could think about was that you’d have to stay here with me, that the life I wanted with you was going to happen. I was selfish. I recognize that, but I believed it would be a good life, Bree. You have to know that.”

“I do and maybe it would have been perfect, Jake, but don’t you see? Now is so much better. You’ve accomplished so much. You have a business that’s thriving, a business you love. Who knows if that would have happened if you’d had the responsibility for a wife and child. And I’m with you now because I want to be. I’m in this relationship a hundred percent, no regrets, no wondering what might have been.”

Because he wanted desperately to believe her, he reached for her, pulled her back into his arms. Then, with her cradled next to his heart, they finally slept.

Megan packed her bag Friday morning and took a taxi to the airport. She’d decided it was time she surprised Mick for once. The show at the gallery where she worked had opened to rave reviews. The pressure was off and she could finally spare the time to make the trip to Chesapeake Shores.