Going Back (19 page)

“This weekend, huh.”

“Tomorrow. Six o’clock? No, let’s
make it five,” he amended. “The earlier we start, the more time
we’ll have together.”

If the evening was a flop, they
wouldn’t want to have more time together. But if the evening was a
flop, they wouldn’t be any worse off than they already were. She
had enough faith in Brad to believe that their friendship would
survive, even if they were as rotten in bed this time as they’d
been last time.

“Five o’clock tomorrow,” she
confirmed. “I think maybe we’re both insane, Brad.”

He pulled her toward himself and
landed a light, surprisingly tender kiss on her lips. “We’re going
to go back and conquer the past, Daff. If that makes us insane, so
be it.” He touched his lips to hers again, then slid her eyeglasses
back up her nose to their proper place. “Between you and me, I
think we’re doing something downright rational.”

“Romance isn’t supposed to be
rational,” she argued, just for the hell of it.

Brad grinned. “If that’s the case,
Daff,” he said resolutely, “we’ll just have to redefine
romance.”

DAPHNE LIFTED the lid and peeked
inside the pot. The simmering clam sauce looked savory and smelled
even better, but she couldn’t resist adding another pinch of
oregano to compensate for the fact that she’d used only about half
the amount of garlic the recipe called for. No matter how much she
relished the flavor of garlic, she wasn’t about to put a hex on her
romantic evening by cultivating bad breath.

Linguini with clam sauce wasn’t
terribly exotic, but Daphne figured that it was a meal she couldn’t
ruin. She’d spent well over an hour Friday night thumbing through
her various cookbooks in search of the perfect dinner menu for her
tryst with Brad, but anything that sounded even remotely
romantic—souffles, pressed duckling, assorted meats marinated in
cognac and set aflame—were well beyond the limits of her culinary
talent. Linguini was fattening, but a gain of a few pounds wasn’t
going to make that much difference, considering how much thinner
she was now than she’d been eight years ago. And anyway, she’d
prepared a huge tossed salad. She could fill up on that while Brad
gorged on the pasta.

Satisfied that the extra oregano
added the requisite zest to her sauce, she set the lid back in
place, checked the wall clock above the sink, and let out a slow
breath to calm herself. Brad was scheduled to arrive in ten
minutes. Her strategy was to avoid any strenuous mental activity in
those ten minutes. If she thought too much—if she thought at
all—she would probably wind up thinking about what a ludicrous idea
this was.

Instead of thinking, she left the
kitchen to check the dining room table setting one last time: beige
linens, brown Ironstone place settings, two brown tapers protruding
from silver candlesticks. Then she wandered to the living room and
inserted the CD of a Mozart piano concerto she’d signed out of the
library that morning. From there she journeyed to the bathroom to
appraise her appearance one final time.

She’d fretted over her outfit even
longer than over the menu, but all in all she wasn’t dissatisfied
with her choice. The blouse she had on was a shiny cream-colored
satin, and she’d left the top several buttons unfastened to offer
an alluring glimpse of what passed for cleavage on her small chest.
She had tucked the blouse into a pair of loose-fitting gray
trousers that would have looked fabulous on Katharine Hepburn in a
nineteen-thirties movie. Actually, Daphne decided, her build was a
lot like Hepburn’s—tall, broad-shouldered and reasonably leggy.
Unfortunately, her face wasn’t anything at all like Hepburn’s, but
Daphne had done her best to maximize her meager assets, adorning
her eyes with a hint of green shadow and a tawny mascara,
highlighting her cheeks with a pink blusher, blow-drying her hair
before the curls had a chance to kink. She’d dabbed her throat with
cologne and put on earrings that dropped like two elegant gold
tears framing her jaw.

The doorbell rang. She experienced
a brief clutch of fear somewhere in her lower abdomen, then shook
it off and strode from the bathroom, stopping in the living room to
turn on the stereo before she answered the door.

All she saw at first were flowers:
red roses, pink roses, baby yellow roses, white lilies, several
sprays of lilac and a few other blossoms she couldn’t identify, all
bunched within a feathery nest of green ferns. A hand held the
enormous bouquet, so Daphne felt it reasonably safe to assume that
a human being was somewhere in the vicinity. She curled her fingers
around the tissue-wrapped stems and pulled the bouquet aside to
find Brad behind the flowers, grinning.

He was wearing a navy blue jacket,
a pale blue shirt and khaki trousers. The effect was preppy in the
extreme, but Daphne liked it. She liked the way the skin of his
neck glowed a healthy golden color beneath the open collar of his
shirt, and the way the fading dusk light played mysteriously over
the sharp lines and planes of his face. She liked the dark density
of his hair, the intriguing shimmer of his eyes, the minty scent of
his aftershave, the stark white evenness of his teeth as his smile
expanded.

Some distant corner of her brain
rattled to life with the abrupt understanding that, in a matter of
hours, she was going to be in her bed with Brad, naked, making love
with him. But she shunted the thought away. It was simply too
disconcerting.

“Are all these flowers for me?” she
asked, pleased by her breezy tone.

“No, just half of them. The other
half are for the Steve and Melanie Persky, up in Armonk. I figured
if things got boring here, we could always take a drive up there to
visit them.” Noticing the way she stiffened slightly at his joke,
he laughed and rested the bulky bouquet within the cradle of her
arm. “Don’t worry, Daff,” he whispered, brushing his lips against
her forehead. “Things aren’t going to get boring here.”

His promise only increased her
anxiety. She struggled to disguise her tension behind a hesitant
smile. “Come in,” she said, realizing at once that she sounded more
like a Marine sergeant barking orders than a seductress luring a
willing victim into her boudoir.

Brad bent to lift a bottle-shaped
paper bag from the step before following her inside. After
commanding him so brusquely to enter her house, Daphne wasn’t about
to make matters worse by reminding him that she didn’t drink
wine.

“You’re nervous,” he observed,
trailing her into the kitchen.

She busied herself laying the
flowers on a counter near the sink and then pulling a porcelain
vase from a cabinet. “Who, me?”

He chuckled. “I’m nervous, too, so
don’t feel bad about it.”

She spun around, startled. “Why are
you nervous?” she asked, thinking that, for someone who claimed to
be nervous, he seemed remarkably relaxed.

He smiled again, and she responded
to his dimples with a discernible tightening in the pit of her
stomach. His gaze roamed her kitchen before coming to rest on the
extravagant floral arrangement. “I’m nervous because those flowers
aren’t going to fit in your vase,” he said.

She cracked a grin and turned to
examine the vase. “You’re right. They’re not. I guess we’ll have to
make a delivery in Armonk, after all.”

“I admit I got a little carried
away,” he apologized, setting the paper bag containing the wine on
the breakfast table and joining her at the sink. “I couldn’t make
up my mind which flowers to buy, so I bought them all. Maybe we
could just fill the sink with water and leave them
there.”

Daphne dismissed his suggestion
with a vague shrug. “I’m sure I’ve got something they’ll fit into,”
she said, swinging open cabinet doors in search of a larger vessel.
She found an empty mayonnaise jar. “How’s this?” she asked, filling
it with water.

“Ugly.”

“The flowers are so pretty, they’ll
make up for it,” she said as she tried to jam the stems through the
neck of the jar.

“Don’t stuff them all in,” he
cautioned her—too late. Her attempt to squeeze too many stems into
too small an opening caused the jar to skid off the counter and
land with a crash on the floor.

Daphne shrieked and jumped back,
trying to elude the splattering water. Brad jumped back, too, then
stared at the mess of broken glass, puddling water and ferns strewn
across the floor between himself and Daphne. He laughed.

“It’s not funny!” she snapped
before succumbing to a reluctant smile. There was something so
crazy about the size of the bouquet, and something so utterly
unromantic about a mayonnaise jar. There was, she had to concede,
something perversely appealing about getting down on her hands and
knees with Brad and swabbing up the mess.

By the time the last sliver of
glass had been disposed of and the water mopped up, Brad’s jacket
was off and Daphne’s sleeves were rolled up. “The florist warned me
I was buying too many flowers,” Brad said, still grinning. “Can we
divide them into two jars or something?”

“I don’t even know if I have two
more empty jars,” Daphne informed him, selecting a couple of roses
for the vase. “There’s a limit to how much mayonnaise I can eat in
any given year.” She wrung out the sponge, accepted the remaining
flowers from Brad and dumped them into the sink, which she filled
with water from the tap. “I’ll figure out something to do with them
later. Right now, I’ve got to get the dinner heated up.”

“Whatever you made, I hope it goes
with red,” he said, pulling the bottle of wine from the bag. “I
picked up a Bordeaux—”

“It goes with red, all right,”
Daphne said, lighting the burner under a kettle of water for the
linguini. “But you’ll have to drink the wine alone.”

He stared at her for a minute, then
at the bottle. “Oh, shit.”

“You don’t have to drink the entire
bottle,” she reassured him. “You can have as much as you like here,
and then you can bring the rest home with you.”

“It isn’t that,” he swore, glaring
at the bottle again. “It’s just...” He sighed. “I had it in my head
that when you romance a woman, the traditional offerings are
flowers and wine. I brought too many flowers, and I shouldn’t have
brought any wine at all. I’m screwing the whole thing
up.”

“Don’t apologize,” she consoled
him. “I like the flowers—in fact, I like them a lot more than I
liked that jar I broke. And seriously, you can have wine without
me. Just because I’m a stick-in-the-mud—”

“You aren’t a stick-in-the-mud,” he
said quietly as he carried the unopened wine bottle to the garbage
pail. Without any fanfare, he tossed it in.

Daphne opened her mouth to object,
then shut it. Throwing out the bottle of wine was quite possibly
the most romantic thing Brad had done so far. “You’re going to be
rewarded for your temperance,” she promised, hearing the bubbly
sound of the water for the pasta beginning to boil. She lowered the
heat and beamed at him.

His answering smile was unnervingly
sexy. “That’s what I’m hoping.”

“I was referring to dinner,” she
said, although she felt her innards thawing into a warm pool of
yearning beneath his uninhibited gaze. The blatant message in his
eyes ought to have made her even more nervous, but for some reason
it didn’t. If she and Brad could laugh about broken jars and wasted
wine, they could surely hang onto their sense of humor for
everything else on the evening’s agenda.

“It does smell good,” Brad said,
steering his hunger from Daphne to the pots on the stove. “As a
matter of fact, it smells like spaghetti.”

“Linguini,” she told him. “Equally
fattening.”

“I love it.” He lifted the lid on
the kettle of boiling water, then the one on the smaller pot.
“Home-made sauce? How domestic. I didn’t know you had it in
you.”

“It’s only about half home-made,”
she confessed, dumping a fistful of pasta into the boiling water
and then giving the sauce an unnecessary stir. “The basic sauce
came out of a can, but I added lots of spices. Of course, the clams
came out of a can, too.”

“Clams,” Brad muttered, recoiling
from the stove.

Daphne eyed him apprehensively.
“You don’t like clams? Oh, Brad, I’m sorry. We can pick them out of
the sauce if you’d like—”

He stared at the sauce with
brooding suspicion. “It’s not that I don’t like clams—it’s that I’m
deathly allergic to them. Even if I picked every last clam out of
the sauce before eating it, I’d still break out in
hives.”

“Oh.” Daphne focused on the
carefully seasoned contents of the pot and grimaced. Just one more
mistake to add to the mayonnaise jar and the wine. “I bet you hate
that piano concerto, too,” she said, reaching the depressing
conclusion that the entire evening was doomed to be as disastrous
as the last evening she’d wound up with Brad. “I know I’m not wild
about it.”

She heard what sounded like a low
chuckle behind her. She couldn’t believe Brad found anything
amusing in the fact that, on top of everything else, the dinner
itself was a complete bomb. But when she turned around, she saw him
practically doubled over with laughter. He was leaning against the
table, his shoulders convulsing and his eyes closed, with tears of
laughter leaking through his thick eyelashes and streaming down his
cheeks. “Daff—” he gasped, “Daffy—you look so serious! Come on,
honey, admit it—we’re really on a roll here!”