My One and Only (6 page)

He didn’t answer, just stared at me with those gypsy eyes, and I looked right back. Twelve years’ distance, a career spent in court, staring down idiot lying spouses…
Don’t mess with me, Nick.
He seemed to sense it, because he looked away abruptly, back in the direction of the shambling bear. “Drinks later? For the sake of the kids?”

Do not be alone with him.

It was a line I often said to my clients. Seeing him alone would muddy the waters, stir up emotions best left untouched, possibly make you agree to things you shouldn’t.

I replaced my sunglasses. “Sure. Are you staying at the lodge?”

“Yes.” He had a way of saying
yes,
Nick did. Fast and sure and disproportionately hot, like he knew exactly what you were going to say and couldn’t wait to give you an affirmative. I’d forgotten about that. Crotch.

“Okay, then,” I said, and my voice sounded nice and normal. “I’m sure we can find a bar or something.”

It wasn’t until about a mile or two later, when I was sitting in the car next to Dennis, clutching his hand, that I was able to take a normal breath. That electric hum was downright painful now.

This was a horrible idea. Every aspect of this whole situation was wrong, wrong, wrong.

CHAPTER FOUR

L
OOKING BACK AT MY LIFE
thus far, I can’t say I exactly regret marrying Nicholas Sebastian Lowery. That being said, I knew he was trouble the very first day I met him. The very first second, even.

I didn’t regret it because I learned a lot. Well, my time with Nick confirmed a lot that I’d already believed. But when a man comes up to you in a bar and tells you you’re the woman he’ll marry, it’s a little…overwhelming. Plus, it’s not the usual come-on line often employed by college students. Even grad students.

I was a junior at Amherst, it was my twentieth birthday, my roomies had gotten me a fake ID, and we were breaking it in. The pub was crowded, hot and noisy. Music thumped, people shouted to be heard…and then I turned and saw a guy staring at me.

Just staring. Steady, unabashed, completely focused. Time seemed to stop for a second, and all those other people, they just faded away, as the dark-haired man…boy…just looked at me.

“You okay?” asked Tina, my closest college chum.

“Sure,” I said, and the spell was broken.

But the guy came over and sat at the table next to us and just kept looking at me, and—forgive the nauseating cliché—it felt as if he really
saw
me, because his concentration was so singular.

“What are you looking at, idiot?” I asked, giving him the sneer that had served me so well.

“My future wife. The mother of my children.” One corner of his mouth pulled up, and every female part I had squeezed warm and hard.

“Bite me,” I said, just about to turn away.

“Anything you want,” he answered, and then he grinned, that lightning-flash smile that said,
Sure, I’m a jerk, but we both know I can get away with murder
…and it was hard not to smile back. So I didn’t turn away. And I did smile.

“So when should we get married?” he asked, pulling his chair closer.

I checked him out discreetly. Nice hands. Beautiful eyes. Shiny dark hair—I was a sucker for dark-haired men. “I wouldn’t marry you if you were the last man on earth, bub.”

“Yet you’re ogling me,” he answered. “What are you drinking, wife?”

I laughed and said, “Crikey, the nerve. Sam Adams Octoberfest.”

I didn’t love my birthday, given my history with the date, but Tina had dragged me out with two other friends. All of us were in our junior year at Amherst, all of us receiving a stellar education at an extremely feminist-slanted college, all of us absolutely confident that the world held no boundaries, all of us planning to Do Important Things. And yet, those three friends took a respectful and almost envious step back.
Look at Harper! Some guy is hitting on her! And he even used the M-word! Give her some space! Don’t blow it!

And though I now cringe to admit, I was swept off my feet, which came as quite a surprise to me. I guess that’s sort of the point of being swept.

Nick Lowery was unlike any of the pale, vague boyfriends I’d had up to this point (and I’d had many and loved none). He was, despite being only twenty-three, a grown-up. In school at UMass, getting his master’s in architecture. He already had a job lined up in June—a real job, not an internship, but as a practicing architect in New York City at a place that made huge buildings all over the world. He knew what he wanted, he had a plan to get it, and the plan was working. In a world of vaguely ambitious, overeducated, not-very-employable college students, he was rather thrilling.

We talked for hours that night. He drank without getting drunk and didn’t try to get me drunk, either. He listened when I spoke, his eyes intent. And such eyes! Too beautiful and tragic somehow, with a secret pain (cough), a gentle torment only an old soul could feel…well, it was clear
I
had a little too much to drink. Nick had grown up in Brooklyn, couldn’t wait to move back to the city, loved the New York Yankees, which resulted in some very fun trash talk (I won, somehow making the Sox sound noble and superior, despite the sorry season they were having). He asked me questions about what I wanted to do, what I loved learning, where I was from. He didn’t seem to grow bored, even when I waxed rhapsodic about environmental law, and he didn’t stare at my boobs. He just seemed to really…like me.

We were both a little shocked when the busboy asked us to leave, as it was now 2:30 a.m. Nick offered to walk me home, and as we crossed the lovely, still campus, he held my hand. That was a first for me—a boy who took my hand. That was a public statement of romantic intentions, and the boys I’d dated (and they were definitely all
boys
) tended more toward the shoulder bump. Hand-holding, I discovered, was quite the turn-on, though I pretended not to notice.

“Can I take you out sometime?” he asked in front of my dorm.

“Is that code for ‘Can I come in and have sex with you?’” I returned.

The answer came almost before I’d finished the question. “No.”

Another first.

I blinked. “Seriously? Because I probably
would
sleep with you.” Actually, at that moment, I wouldn’t have. At least I didn’t think so. But those eyes…that rather beautiful hand holding mine so firmly…“Are you asking me out on a
date?
”

“Yes.” That fast, certain yes. “Yes, I want to take you on a date. No, I don’t want to have sex with you. Not tonight, anyway.”

“Why? Are you a Mormon? Suffer from ED? Are you gay?”

He grinned, his gypsy eyes transformed. “No, no and no. Because, Harper Elizabeth James”—crap, I’d told him my entire name (and he remembered, oh sigh!)—“that would be…disrespectful.”

I blinked. “Well, now you have indeed rendered me speechless. I can state with absolute certainty that I have never before heard that particular line.” Prelaw. What can I say? We all sounded like pompous idiots. Plus, I’d had three whole beers, which made me sound even more idiotic and pompous.

But Nick seemed to think I was cute. “I’ll call you tomorrow.”

“Now
that
one I’ve heard before. Full of sound and bullshit, signifying nothing.”

He called me nine hours later, having hacked into the college website to find my cell number. “It’s Nick.”

“Nick who?” I asked, blushing for perhaps the first time in my life.

“The father of your children.”

“Right, right.” I paused, unable to suppress a smile. “Do I at least get dinner before I have to start breeding?”

He took me to a real restaurant in Northampton…not just a college-kid hangout with four-dollar falafels, but one with tables and waiters and everything, and thus began my first real relationship. He called when he said he would. He sent me little jokes via email, met me for lunch, sometimes showed up outside my classroom to walk across campus with me. We often went to the movies, where we both talked incessantly, much to the annoyance of the other patrons. We dated, as in old-fashioned, 1950s dating, and I couldn’t believe how fun it was.

But for an entire month, he didn’t kiss me or touch me (aside from holding my hand, for crying out loud), and by then, I was dying of lust. Which, I want you to know, I hid very well. Never mentioned it once. I just waited, more obsessed than I wanted to be, wondering if he was playing some little game. But I found myself waiting for those phone calls, and my heart did this weird leaping thing when I saw his face.

Four weeks and two days after we first met, Nick had me over to his apartment for the first time, a typical grotty little place which was atypically clean. He made me dinner—lasagna and salad and warm bread. Poured me red wine without trying to liquor me up. He’d made a
pie
for dessert, which had me once again wondering out loud if he was indeed gay. He wouldn’t let me do the dishes. As we sat on his couch (holding hands but otherwise chaste), he told me why he thought the Brooklyn Bridge was the most beautiful man-made structure on earth and how he would take me there on my virgin trip to New York and we’d walk across it and get an ice cream in Brooklyn and then walk across again, taking plenty of time to worship the world’s first steel-wire suspension bridge.

“I’ve always favored the architecture of Denny’s myself,” I said.

“I may have to divorce you.”

“I call the yacht and the apartment in Paris. It’s in the prenup, of course.”

Nick laughed. “I don’t believe in prenups.”

“All the better. I will take you to the cleaners, boy. Paris apartment, you’re mine, all mine.”

“Why did I marry such a heartless woman?” he grinned.

I smiled back. “You haven’t even kissed me yet, Nick. I won’t marry you and bear our five healthy sons if you fail to thrill me.”

He looked at me, a little smile playing around his mouth, two days of knee-weakening razor stubble, dark hair tousled, and those gypsy eyes. He reached out and touched my lips with one finger. He didn’t have to kiss me. I was thrilled anyway. And, quite out of the blue, suddenly terrified. My breath stuttered in my chest, and my heart seemed to contract, and even as he leaned forward, I thought
Don’t let him be too good. Don’t fall in love.

But he was, and I did. It was…stunning, really, to be kissed like this, and I felt that I’d never really understood what kissing was before. It was as if our mouths had been made to kiss only each other, and the shock and thrill, the urgent, hot feeling, the little sounds of kissing, the—dang it—the rightness. I never thought I’d be desperate for someone—I’d had seven years and four weeks and two days to teach myself not to love anyone desperately. But when Nick kissed me for the first time, my whole body came alive. It was terrifying how good it was.

We kissed and groped on the couch for eons, until finally, Nick stood up, took me by the hand and led me to his bedroom, kissing me, touching me, his skin hot on mine, his cheeks flushed, eyes nearly black. It was as if we had all the time in the world for this, for this sweet, melting ache that made me shake. I pulled his shirt over his head, and my hands explored his smooth chest, his addictive skin, the lovely space above his collarbone. There was a ragged little scar over his heart, which I traced with my fingers as I kissed his beautiful neck, felt his thudding pulse under my lips, tasted the salt of his sweat. His hands were hot, his mouth was gentle, a small smile playing on his lips whenever he opened his eyes to look at me.

I didn’t object when his clever fingers unbuttoned the back of my dress, but when his hand slid up my thigh, I jumped and grabbed his wrist. Time to stop. Time to leave. But I didn’t move.

“Far enough?” he asked, his voice husky, his face against my neck.

I swallowed. “Nick?”

He raised his head.
Oh, you’re in trouble, Harper,
my brain said. I couldn’t manage to speak, as the words were stuck in my throat. Feelings of awkwardness, dorkiness, embarrassment roiled around with the heat and lust and wanting.

“What is it, honey?” he asked, his voice so gentle it hurt my heart.

If he hadn’t said
honey,
my guess is that I would’ve pulled my usual routine and fled, feeling somewhat guilty and completely safe.
Get out, get out, get out,
my brain yammered. I swallowed and looked away.

“I’ve never done this before,” I whispered. God! Being a virgin at twenty and change…in a blue state, nonetheless…at a liberal college…et cetera…!

Nick blinked. Because sure, I was a toughie, very blasé and ubercool. And pretty, let’s not forget that, though I didn’t spend a lot of time gazing into a mirror. I’d had quite a few guys chase after me, and I’d gone out with many. Guys loved me. My
modus operandi
was to insult and condescend while at the same time flirt, then allow a guy to walk me back to my dorm, where we’d engage in some groping and snogging for a horny hour or so. Then I’d stand up, adjust my clothes, kick the guy out and never speak to him again. This made me extraordinarily popular, for some mysterious reason. Was I a tease? Absolutely. I wasn’t sure there was another way to be.

Until now. I couldn’t seem to look at Nick, suddenly fascinated with the window shade, the radiator, the crack in the plaster wall. He turned my face back toward him.

“We don’t have to do anything,” he said. “It’s fine.” He smiled, and I could see that he meant it, and damn it all to hell, I fell a little deeper.

“I’d like to,” I whispered, and my eyes stung a little.

He looked at me seriously. “You sure?” he asked. I nodded.

“Very sure?” he asked, touching my lower lip.

I nodded again.

He kissed me, sweetly, gently, then smiled against my mouth. “Sure enough to marry me?”

“Nick,” I said, unable to suppress a laugh, “can you please shut up and do me?”

And so he did, and it was gentle and slow and sweet, and oh, God…it felt as if we were meant to be together, and suddenly, I could see why all those sonnets had been written, all those Hallmark cards printed, all those movies. Because it was…real. For the first time in a very long time, I trusted someone to take care of me, and he did. Cherished me. Made love to me. All those clichés…true.

When it was over, when we lay twined together, sweaty and breathing hard, my eyes open a little too wide, as the glow faded and my heart rate slowed, a chilly terror crept into bed with me. The fear of being left, or exposed, or judged…or whatever, I was only twenty, not the type who examined emotions, the same way I didn’t plunge my hand into a bag full of broken glass. I just knew that I was freaking terrified.

I cleared my throat. “Well, I should…I need to…I have to run,” I said, babbling slightly. “That was wicked pissah, as we say here in the Bay State. And, um…I’ll see you soon. Thanks, Nick. Bye.” I got up, grabbed my dress and panties and pulled them on as I fled. Made it to the living room, opened the door, only to have Nick come up right behind me and push it closed again.

“No, no. No, you don’t,” he said, sliding around to put himself between the door and me. “Harper, come on.”

“I’m absolutely positive you wouldn’t keep me here against my will, Nick,” I said lightly, not looking at him.

He stared at me a long moment, then stepped aside. “What happened?”