Material Girl (46 page)

Why it had taken him so long to figure out the root of his vague discomfort he couldn't begin to guess, but at that moment, sitting in that stuffy, overpriced, overly-pleased-with-themselves restaurant, he could see it as clearly as the nose on his face.

“What?” she said, curious as to why he was staring at her.

“I was sort of thinking all of us would be okay. You. Me. Cole.”

Her cheeks darkened; she glanced at her plate with a slight frown. “I was just talking about the long run.”

“Yeah. So was I.”

Robin didn't say anything. She avoided his gaze, attacked her lamb, and remarked that the wine seemed a little flat.

And Jake was too stung to press it any further right then—after all, there was the inevitable arguing over the check, which he won (but not without some polite scuffling

and an instant coronary upon seeing the total). And there was the ride home, the inevitable question of whose house they would go to.

Nor did Jake press the issue over the next several days as he tried to balance the end of the semester finals, Cole's counseling sessions, and finishing up the work at Robin's house. The problem was too big, too fundamental to be handled casually, and though he tried to push it down, the damn thing wiggled its way back up until it was playing major head games with him, finally weighing him down like some friggin' mental boulder.

It was not an issue he wanted to face. But he was once again conscious that he and Robin had, in his humble opinion, crossed over that line where the relationship demanded an explanation of intent, at least a road map. Anything to indicate where they were going.

Except that he wasn't sure he could handle the answer.

And oh, the irony of his anxiety was not lost on him, not by a long shot. He was the one who had never been able to maintain a relationship more than a while, and Lord knew the only thing he had ever committed to was his Visa bill. Yet here he sat, floundering about like a fish on a hook, so lousy at the relationship thing that he really didn't know how to go about the next step.

Worse, he wasn't certain Robin even knew there was a next step.

And there to help him through the minefield was the ever-helpful, ever-present Evan Iverson. If there was one person who personified the differences that loomed so huge between Jake and Robin, it was that asshole—capital A, capital Hole. God knew there were enough reminders without Evan—Aaron Lear, who hadn't called since Robin had decided to choose the course of her own life. Norma Manning, who lectured Jake about the perils and pitfalls of loving a woman with more money than God. Mia and Michael, permanent and empty fixtures in Robin's living room, a perpetual sneer on their surgically enhanced faces. Lucy and Zaney, smart people that they were, who came from the same place as Jake, but were not, as far as he could see,

stupid enough to aspire to Robin's world like him.

But among all of those contenders, it was Evan who magnified their differences and held them up for inspection. Evan, who could, just by walking in the room, spotlight all of Jake's glaring inadequacies. And as Evan and Robin happily plotted the last stages of her grand acquisition, the man came to embody for Jake all the reasons why Robin would never—should never-—commit to him.

It was not any single thing Evan did, but every fucking thing he did. From the little gifts he foisted on Robin, to his ability to sound so damned smart about this acquisition thing. It was the way he dressed in clothes that cost more than a house, or the fact that he did not appear to have even an ounce of fat on him. It was the way he looked at Jake with complete contempt, as if he was a mass murderer pretending to be a choirboy.

His little gifts came under the guise of congratulating Robin on her work, or t hank ing her for some silly thing. Gifts like tropical flowers, imported candy, and trinkets in silk-covered boxes that came waltzing in, just so Robin could ignore them or eye them dispassionately. Gifts that bored her, gifts that Jake couldn't contemplate affording on his annual income, much less on a whim.

He tried to take solace in the fact that he wasn't the only one to be disgusted. On the days Lucy came to the house, she, too, seemed pretty put off by the whole gift scene. “What a waste of money,” she said one day as she looked in a blue Tiffany box that had arrived the day before.

“I know,” Robin muttered absently.

Lucy pulled a little porcelain something or other out of the box; it looked too small to be anything practical. “You know,” Lucy remarked, “for what he probably paid for this, you could buy Z a new brain or something.” She was, of course, referring to Zaney, now known as simply “Z” within the bounds of their improbable friendship. Lucy was always one to call them as she saw them, and on this point, Jake couldn't have agreed with her more.

And Jake hated the way Robin and Evan would pore over work papers, their heads so close to one another as they

punched numbers into a calculator. He hated the way Robin would look at Evan at times when he explained things, hated it so much that he could not wait to finish the job, get out of her house, and onto something where he could feel himself again.

Right. And when exactly did he expect to feel himself again? There would still be the issue of money between them. Not his lack of it, precisely, but Material Girl's irreverence of it. She bought whatever, whenever, whether she needed it or not, and every time she came home with a handful of brightly colored bags, that old Madonna song would jingle in his head. All right, he knew she had a lot of dough, an amount he was pretty sure was too huge for his brain to even conceive. Every time she paid according to their contract, she rounded up to the nearest thousand. The nearest thousand. “You never know what might crop up,” she said airily when he protested. Any other job, he would have been stunned and relieved. But on this job, it made him feel like a charity case.

Yep, the money thing was really beginning to grate.

Robin never seemed to think of it all, just acted as if it would always be there, and in mass quantities. The weekend Robin called her sister Rachel on a whim and suggested they meet in Chicago for a “jazz thingie” alarmed him. The week she and Mia took off for Paris (not Paris, Texas—-Paris, France) for a little shopping astounded him. “We'll be back before you know it,” she had said, kissing him as she flew out the door.

And if that wasn't enough, it bothered him greatly that her money bothered him at all. Jake really, honestly, didn't begrudge her a dime of what she had—he just wished she would appreciate it. Even her father's threat of cutting her off had not seemed to make an impression—she continued to spend freely.

And just what was he going to do about the money thing? He could hardly ask her to denounce it all and live in true Manning fashion, contract to contract, month to month. But on the other hand, he could not seem to get used to the idea of her having so much more resource than him. Between

Evan, her endless stream of money, and her questionable commitment to them, to Robin and Jake, The Couple, Jake was starting to wonder all over again if he was living in a dream—fantasy or nightmare.

He would have been very surprised to know he wasn't alone in his bewilderment.

Robin was also figuring she had somehow managed to get herself locked in some parallel universe where she had actually fallen in love, money was an object, and she was struggling to understand a business she had once thought was hers by birthright alone. This was definitely not the world as she knew it.

First and foremost was this business of having gone off and fallen in love, the one thing she had always believed would never happen to someone who was alternately known as The Man-eater. But the night they had come back from the ranch and Jake had left her looking hurt and angry and really just disappointed had undone her, affecting her in one of those buried places within her. She couldn't sleep that night and spent the next day wandering irritably from room to room (as she was prone to do when he wasn't around), pretty much hating her big empty house. Pretty much being mad at him. She thought he was a baby. She thought he was asking too much of her. How hard would it have been to let it go, to let her nurse the wounds her father had inflicted?

It was the tiny initials, the LH and DD forevermore, carved so carefully in the wood trim of the master bedroom that had finally cracked her hard veneer. She imagined that the tiny little inscription, but monstrously huge sentiment (if Jake's theory was correct) was all that was left of two people's lives, not this house, or the many things LH and DD might have had. Just lockstep in eternity. How wonderful to be so completely devoted to someone that you would wish forevermore. And gazing at it, Robin had sunk down onto the window seat, had felt her hard heart shatter, brick by brick, until there was nothing left but the raw pink thing underneath, eager for someone to hold it. Not just anyone. Jacob Manning. Forevermore.

It was, as they say, an epiphanous moment. So epiphan-ous and gushing that Robin had sat on his front porch for almost two hours, waiting to say she loved him, that she needed him and his strength, his comfort, his affection. Worried that he might have dumped her and called Lindy (oh God!) in a fit of frustration. Fearing that she would have to retreat from this feeling and from his porch when the clouds started rolling in, but unwilling to give in, she had waited until the last possible moment.

When at last he had turned into the drive, she had silently cheered herself. Her perseverance had paid off! It was a sign from the Relationship Gods that she had finally done something right, that she did have it in her! But then Jake had gotten out of his truck, and she had seen the look on his face and felt that horrible rush of fear and regret all over again. But it was also the moment she knew that she really loved him, without reservation, loved him so much that it was reverberating throughout her entire body.

And she still felt that way, the feeling growing stronger each day.

Unfortunately, she had also discovered that opening the door to her heart did not make everything right with the world like it did in the movies.

First, there was the money thing. Or her sudden and serious lack of it to be exact, along with the new and intimidating sensation of getting an overdraft statement from the bank. Robin Lear, negative fund balance. Yikes.

All her life, she had never wanted for money. If she ran out (which she did on a pretty regular basis), she simply dipped into the account her dad had set up. But after the horrible showdown at Blue Cross Ranch, she wouldn't touch a dime of Lear money that she hadn't earned. Her new and fervent determination never to accept another dime from Dad had left her to her own devices. Only, she had no devices. And she didn't earn nearly enough to support the lifestyle she had created. Jesus, but this house, the renovations, her extensive wardrobe cost a lot to maintain. Not to mention the cost of shoes and handbags and food! Damn!

There ought to be a law or something for what they charged for food!

Actually, it was much worse than that—she didn't know how to stop spending. When her paycheck from LTI was deposited in two-week intervals, she resumed her lifestyle, certain that she would do better. And then she would proceed to her usual rounds of fine dining, lots of good wine, an occasional long-distance outing. By the end of the said two-week interval, she found herself staring at a long line of zeroes and minus signs in her checkbook. Her hopeless money management was made worse by the fact that all those little sayings Grandma and Grandpa had said throughout the years were beginning to make sense. Just to name a few: Money doesn't grow on trees, young lady! Do you think it rains pennies? You're just throwing good money after bad! Frightening how accurate they were.

Of course, this was not something she could confide in Jake, seeing as how he was so sensitive about money to begin with. And while he could be really irritating with his remarks about her spending {Don't you think if you are going to shell out a couple of grand, you might want to know more than it's a jazz thingie?), she had to hand it to him—he did seem to keep a pretty firm rein on his spending. Like down to the penny. Lucky bastard.

Mia was no help, and in fact, she was really pretty dangerous. Mia Carpenter lived off her family's oil money and had never worked a day in her life—unless one counted that three-month stint at Tina's boutique. If she wasn't shopping, she was sleeping, and up until this year, Robin had been her staunchest supporter. But the week they flew to Paris to look at wedding gowns, Robin began to see a side of Mia she didn't particularly like.

The problem was, with all those minuses in her checkbook, Robin could not live up to her share of the shopping and was forced to watch Mia spend without thought. Okay, she was ready to handle that—it wasn't like dropping a couple of grand here or there was new to her or anything. But what she wasn't prepared for was the horrible discovery that without a lot of things to seek out and buy, she and Mia

had precious little in common. In fact, she didn't particularly like Mia. All the woman could talk about was what a bastard Michael was while she looked for a wedding gown. When Robin tried to engage her in something a little more meaningful, Mia acted bored and quickly changed the subject. Remarkable—after twenty years of friendship, Robin discovered Mia had the personal depth of a tea saucer.

Just one more thing Grandma was right about. God, was there no end?

Well, anyway, Robin couldn't get back to Houston fast enough.

Houston, where Evan was there waiting for her. Evan, brilliant Evan, who knew every aspect of the freight business. He grasped everything so quickly, immediately placed it in a proper context and explained it to her, taught her so much about the business. He showed her how Lou Harvey was manipulating his books so as to look more profitable than he was. He taught her how to age the equipment in Girt's operation so they could offer a fair price for it. He gave her a neat little trick for figuring out profits-to-earning margins. And he managed to keep tabs on what American Motorfreight was doing so he would not be out maneuvered. How could she not admire that?