Mother, Please! (18 page)

Temptation slid the length of his body, fired by the tenderness of her shy movements, the hesitation of her response. He wanted to press, to push, to show her how much he wanted her, but he knew this wasn’t the time or the place. He’d known her too many years to risk making a wrong move now, now that he had her this close.

In the seconds that followed, however, she turned him inside out, stepping fully into his body as her hands left his hips, her palms sliding up his bare rib cage and on around his back where she kneaded the strap of muscle running along his spine. He
groaned; he couldn’t help it, his body reacting to the sensuousness of her touch.

He deepened the kiss, moving his hand to her nape and holding her still as he urged her lips apart. She opened with no hint of indecision or uncertainty, allowing him the intimacy he sought and returning the same. The beat of his heart grew painfully hard.

The taste of her tongue, the show of her willingness, the sense that she shared his desire quickly became his undoing—or would have had their tryst not been interrupted suddenly by a sharp clearing of a throat and teasing “Ahem.”

Avery jumped back, her mouth red, her eyes wide as she met her mother’s humorously curious expression. David simply accepted the inevitable scrutiny as Suzannah’s gaze moved from one to the other, her brows arched, the corners of her mouth lifting despite her obvious battle not to smile.

S
UZANNAH
R
ICE WAS
fifty-eight years old, yet appeared young enough to be her daughter’s contemporary.

Sitting next to her mother on the living room’s rich burgundy-and-floral chintz sofa, Avery felt as if she were looking at one of her girlfriends rather than at a woman twenty-five years her senior.

Suzannah brought her cup of coffee to her mouth to blow across the steaming surface, her lips smooth with a light mauve gloss, her expressive eyes emphasized with no more than a dusting of taupe shadow.

Her brown hair was colored and highlighted in her one and only display of vanity. She’d told Avery repeatedly that until her body gave out, she refused to give up her contact lenses or to let her hair go gray.

She’d also refused for years to butt into Avery’s life. Or so that had been the case until recently. The past few weeks Suzannah had been relentlessly insisting that Avery was stagnating, that the hours she
kept at work were unhealthy, as was her lack of a personal life beyond the bakery.

But Avery didn’t want to think about her mother’s new penchant for meddling or her self-improvement issues needing to be addressed. All she wanted was an answer to her question about her mother’s whereabouts this morning instead of this grilling over the kiss with David, who was back to banging away beneath the kitchen sink.

“If you were going out, why didn’t you just let me know? It’s not like my showing up here was unexpected.”

“I know, sweetie. I’m sorry. I hardly had time to get dressed and meet Leslie, much less let you know I was going out.” Suzannah gave a quick pat to Avery’s denim-clad knee.

“I bought you a cell phone for a reason, you know.” Avery kicked off her sandals and pulled her knees to her chest. “It doesn’t do a bit of good when you leave it in the charging cradle.”

“I love the phone, Avery. I just forgot to take it. This morning was so hectic. Leslie was only in town for a few hours, and deciding to have breakfast together was a very last-minute plan.”

“Do I know Leslie?” Avery thought back to the photos and keepsakes in her mother’s albums from her pep club and sorority days.

“I’m sure you don’t. We lost touch after school
and only recently became reacquainted. Suzannah smiled as if that was a sufficient explanation to get her off the hook for skipping out without a word on their longtime, mother-and-daughter routine.

And if Avery were to be honest with herself, it was. Her mother didn’t owe her any explanations. Avery certainly wasn’t ready for a role reversal in their relationship. Yet here she was, sounding like she was the old fogy who couldn’t deal with change.

Ugh. How unattractive was that?

Suzannah lifted her coffee again and smiled at her daughter over the cup. “Tell me, sweetie. Did you have a nice time here with David?”

“You mean did your lawn-watering, sink-clogging matchmaking work?”

“Well, yes. Though none of the morning’s plans were premeditated. Except, perhaps, using the sprinkler to send you to the kitchen door.” Another sip of coffee. Another smile. “So, when did you and David get so cozy?”

“About ten seconds before you walked in.” Avery had welcomed her mother’s interruption even as she’d hated it. She’d longed to go on kissing David forever. The feel of his hands, his lips, his tongue, even his body pressed to hers had resonated with an unexpected sense of rightness.

But as he’d said, she thought she had ruined his
life. Even if he’d been exaggerating, what right did she have to feel anything but guilt and regret? If she hadn’t taken that disastrous risk with Johnny Boyd, David’s future could’ve turned out so differently.

Yet she shivered, remembering. She’d kissed David Marks. After ten months of circling, avoiding, retreating and hiding, it was all she could do to sit still knowing he lay on his back in the next room.

“It was nothing,” she finally said to her mother. “It didn’t mean a thing.”

“Oh, Avery, of course it did,” her mother argued. “A man doesn’t kiss a woman the way David kissed you without a measure of intent.”

Intent?
What was that supposed to mean? How long had her mother been standing and watching, anyhow? “Mom, it was just a kiss. Besides, I’ve known David for years.” She waved a hand dismissively.

Suzannah sighed. “Don’t discount what might develop, sweetie.”

Avery looked at her mother quizzically. “Is this more of your matchmaking?”

“Of course not,” Suzannah denied, the very picture of innocence. Avery didn’t believe her mother for a minute. “Not that I don’t think you and David wouldn’t make a perfect couple, mind you. But I
would never push the two of you into a relationship.”

“Thanks for that,” Avery said, really not liking this conversation. “I enjoy my life as it is. I doubt I even have time for a relationship. The bakery keeps me plenty busy and the hours are insane. You know that,” she finished, pleading her case.

“Yes, I know. But I like to see you happy.” Suzannah arched a brow. “And kissing David definitely made you happy.”

“Mother, please!” Avery felt a flush rise up her neck. She was not going to sit here and have a birds-and-bees conversation with her mother. “Kissing David has nothing to do with happiness.” In fact, she had no idea
what
it had to do with. “I don’t need a man to be happy.”

“No. Of course you don’t. I would never maintain that any woman does.” Suzannah’s expression grew wistful. “But it’s certainly nice to have a man with whom to share one’s happiness.”

An unexpected pang of sadness settled like a cloak on Avery’s shoulders. It was so hard to believe her father had been gone for five years—especially when she was in this room, on this floor of the house where they’d lived as a family for all of her life.

It was one of the reasons she loved the time she
spent here so much. “I know, Mom. I miss him, too.”

Suzannah frowned. “Miss who, sweetie?”

Miss who?
Miss who?
“Uh, Daddy? Isn’t that who you’re talking about?”

With a slight, melancholy laugh, Suzannah shook her head. “Oh, Avery. I’ll always miss your father. But I was talking about you, dear. I want you to be happy, to know what I knew for so long, the joy of sharing that feeling with a man who loves you.”

Avery squirmed where she sat, thinking of loving David, of David loving her, wondering if he’d thought of her over the years as often as she’d thought of him.

And then Suzannah’s smile deepened, brightening her face. “Who knows? That man could be David.”

Rolling her eyes, Avery ignored the thumping of her heart that reminded her of David’s kiss. “You just told me you weren’t matchmaking.”

“And I’m not,” Suzannah insisted. “It’s just as I said. I want you to be happy.”

“And just as I said. I am happy.” Avery smiled reassuringly, telling herself that she was only listening for David because visiting with her mother was difficult when a third party hovered. Not that David hovered. “Besides, David and I will never be anything but casual friends.”

“Kissing friends.”

When Avery glared, her mother capitulated.

“Okay, okay. No more matchmaking.”

“Thank you.” Avery breathed a short-lived sigh of relief, because her mother’s next words hit her like a blow to the chest.

“I suppose it would be difficult anyway for you to have a relationship with David considering your history.”

Avery stared at her mother while Suzannah sipped at her coffee. It was as if now that she’d dropped her bomb, nothing mattered but the caffeine.

Ooh, it was unfair how sneaky mothers could be.

“I’m not falling for your tricks, Mother. You can’t possibly know anything about what history I might or might not have with him.”

“Of course I do. I visited David when he was in the hospital, you know. Before he returned to school from his suspension.”

“What did he tell you?” Avery demanded after swallowing the lump of dread in her throat.

“Nothing, really.” Suzannah shifted on the sofa, leaning back against the overstuffed arm opposite Avery who said, “Okay, then,” right before her mother added, “But Johnny Boyd told me everything.”

God. What was happening here, and could it please stop? “When did you talk to Johnny?”

“I tutored him at the alternative center before he was allowed back to regular classes. He talked about the girl who had been with him and how David had been jealous and tried to take her away.”

Avery let her head fall back into the cushions, closing her eyes and bouncing her head as if beating it against a brick wall. “He was such a liar.”

“I know, Avery,” her mother said softly. “Anyone who knew David knew he would never go after Johnny Boyd out of jealousy. Which meant he went after him for another reason. Knowing a girl was involved made the rest of the puzzle fall into place. There was only one girl over whom David would have been so protective and reckless.”

“Me,” Avery said softly. She hadn’t breathed a word about what had happened that night to anyone. Not even directly to David until this morning.

She’d been wrong not to tell all then, thinking her silence would prevent Johnny from going after David. Young and selfish and deathly afraid of rumor. Fearful of anyone knowing how close she’d come to being truly hurt because curiosity had driven her to find out how much of Johnny’s bad-boy reputation was rumor, how much was truth.

Stupid and selfish and very, very ashamed.

Yet all the time she’d thought her secret safe her
parents had known. And never said a word. Who else? she wondered. How many others were aware of what had happened beneath the bleachers that night?

“I need to say something, Avery.” At the wounded sound of her mother’s voice, Avery opened her eyes. “I should have asked you about it, but I didn’t. I wanted you to come to me. I knew that was wrong, but mothers are not always sensible when their own children are hurting.”

“It wasn’t that I was hurting…” Another half-truth because, of course, she had been—as much for David as for herself.

“Yes. You were. But I think you were more confused than anything.” Suzannah paused, her caring eyes meeting Avery’s, which had become watery and blurred. “I watched you for signs of depression, for signs of drug use—”

“Mom!”

“I know, I know.” Suzannah waved a hand. “It sounds so dramatic now when I speak of it. At the time, however, I was worried that you might need help to cope, and had I hovered or been too insistent I feared that you wouldn’t have come to me if you did.”

Avery’s coping had been dealing with the unbearable guilt over what had happened to David as much as anything. Or perhaps knowing what he’d
gone through had kept her from thinking of her own near miss.

At this point in time, she wasn’t sure her past mental state mattered. She wanted her mother to know the truth so they could both put away all that had happened.

She reached up, unbuttoned the top two buttons of her tunic and pointed to the old scar along her collarbone. “Do you remember asking me how this happened?”

Suzannah frowned, studying the narrow strip of light skin. “Of course I do, sweetie. You caught the top of a chain-link fence while papering a house. I remember telling you that you could pay to replace your own uniform top.”

Avery smiled ironically at the lie she’d told. She’d known the story would never raise an eyebrow with her parents and would work as a perfect cover-up. “It wasn’t a fence. Johnny cut me when he sliced off my top.”

Suzannah’s eyes widened; she smothered a gasp. Avery watched the pulse jump in her mother’s throat. “I’m sorry I never told you,” she whispered. “I should have told you. If I’d told the truth about everything then, told all of the truth, I would’ve saved so many people so much hurt.”

“Oh, Avery—”

“Sink’s done, Suzannah.”

David’s voice from the doorway drew Avery’s attention away from her mother’s forgiving expression. He stood there in his wrongly buttoned shirt, drying his hands, his hair disheveled, a short smear of grease on one cheek.

He was gorgeous, beautiful, a man made to turn heads. He sent her heart racing by doing no more than standing still. And her stupidity could have gotten him killed.
She could have gotten him killed!
And she’d lived with that truth now for fifteen years.

Shame came in waves, a tide of emotion causing her to feel very small. She was surprised he had any desire to speak to her, much less the sort of desire he’d shown her minutes before in the kitchen. How blind she truly had been.

“What was wrong?” her mother asked, following Avery’s cue and turning her attention to David.

He shrugged, blinked, moved his frowning gaze from Avery to Suzannah. “Looked like celery strings. And eggshells.”

The celery strings and eggshells could wait. Avery was done holding it in. “David, were you aware my mother has known the truth all this time about what happened with me and you and Johnny Boyd?”

David’s hands stilled on the rag. His focus
moved from Avery to her mother and back. “All about it?”

Avery narrowed her eyes. “So, you did know.”

He shook his head. “I only knew what Johnny had told her. About me trying to steal away his girl. Not that she knew you were the one involved.”

“Actually, David, my daughter was just telling me, or rather, showing me the extent of her involvement,” Suzannah said, giving up Avery’s last secret. “It seems neither you nor I knew the full extent of the truth.”

At David’s fiercely questioning expression, Avery leaned forward over her knees and buried her face in her hands. She heard his footsteps on the plush mauve carpet as he came farther into the room and knew she wouldn’t be getting out of there without revealing all.

“Avery?” He said her name softly, as if she would bolt should he raise his voice. It didn’t matter what tone he used; his determination was clear.

Opening her eyes, she saw his work boots and realized he was standing too near, and she was going to have to face him with more of the truth, and why oh why hadn’t she moved to Tibet years ago and lived out her life as a monk?

Hands on her knees, she pushed to her feet to stand toe-to-toe with David, watching the pulse beat in the hollow of his throat even though she spoke
in response to her mother when she said, “I never told anyone about the knife.”