Never Again Good-Bye (17 page)
Y
ou … you don’t have to do this,” Laney whispered, clinging desperately to the shields that protected her.
“Yes, I do. Believe me, I do.”
“But … Wes … if you think you owe me something, you don’t. Our arrangement is fine with me.” Her gaze gravitated to the family portrait that had haunted her, to the blond woman who had won Wes’s heart first, then left it aching because she had no choice. “Besides … your memories. They’re everywhere. They’re part of you. I don’t want you to try to feel something for me that you just can’t feel.”
His brows arched in denial, and his mouth formed the word “oh” on a long, drawn-out breath. “I wouldn’t do that, Laney.” How could he tell her how he’d dreamed about her, how he watched her when she slept, how he thought about her every moment during the day? How could he tell her that she was already healing him, that his weakness for her was also proving to be his strength?
“Not deliberately,” she said. Her eyes were still on the portrait, and he followed her gaze.
“Is it this house?” he asked finally. “Is it the pictures, the furniture, the things that were Patrice’s?”
“Partially,” she admitted with great effort. “I feel like everything I have really belongs to someone else.”
His eyes made a careful study of the floor. Of course she’d feel that way. He’d practically rubbed it in her face. “Then we could go somewhere else. We could go to your house. Sort of … take it easy, watch TV, swim, maybe. Just the two of us.”
Laney hesitated a moment. She’d never seen that warmth in anyone’s eyes, at least not in connection with her. And that barrier between them had given her an odd sense of security. She wasn’t certain if she was ready to make herself vulnerable to another man.
Wes’s eyes were longing, yearning, beseeching. His voice flowed over her racked nerves like warm, healing honey. “Please, Laney … I just want to get to know you better, without Amy looking over our shoulders.”
She wanted to cry, not from pain or rejection but from rising joy. She wanted to be alone with him, too, wanted to finish that kiss. With a heavy sigh, she thought of the moments over the past few days when one smile from him, one touch, could have made all the difference in her world. If he offered it now, it could make all the difference in their marriage.
“All right,” she whispered. “We’ll go to my house.”
W
es watched Laney from the kitchen window of her house as he stirred the iced tea he’d made. She stood beside the pool, her back to him, her hair sweeping across her back as the warm breeze flirted incessantly with it. The pool lights were on, bathing her in a blue, undulating light in the darkness. He closed his eyes and moaned. She was so beautiful it almost hurt to look at her.
She was still tense. Even now, looking at her from so far away, he could see the stress in her shoulders, in the way she balled her hands into fists, in the stiff set of her spine. He watched her dip a toe in the water as her skirt flapped across her calves, and realized there was more to her fear than the ghost of Patrice. Coming to this house hadn’t changed things. It had only made her escape one set of threatening memories to face another. Maybe, he thought as he dropped the ice cubes into the glasses, she needed healing too.
She didn’t hear him when he walked out to her, and quietly he put the glasses on the ground and lowered to the concrete beside her. When he reached out to take her hand and she gave it freely, he realized he’d been granted a second chance …
A
second chance, Laney thought. He was giving her a second chance to love. A second chance to trust. But what if she failed again?
She had felt that warmth before, had been seduced beside this very pool, had made love in that house when her father was out of town. She had fallen in love, and it had been a mistake that changed her life.
Wes didn’t demand anything of her. He only sat quietly beside her, staring out across the water.
“Laney.” His voice was soft against the night. “Tell me about him,” he said. “About Amy’s father. He was the only one, wasn’t he?”
“The first and the last,” she whispered.
They were quiet for a moment, but Wes did not push her. His thumb made a light circular pattern on her hand, a simple gesture that spoke volumes, and she suddenly wanted him to know.
“I was eighteen when we met,” she said softly. “He was nineteen.”
“Were you in love with him?”
“Yes,” she whispered. “Hopelessly.”
A pine straw fell into the pool, and they watched it float across the surface. “He was a freshman at LSU, home for the summer, and I was just out of high school. He told me he loved me, said we’d get married. I believed him.”
“What was he like?”
Tension seeped out of her with a slow exhalation of breath, and her head relaxed against his shoulder.
“He had sandy hair and blue eyes,” she whispered. “He was in prelaw. Had aspirations of going into politics. He probably did. He was a lot like my father, I think. Hard to get to know, almost cold in his own way, and when you got some interest out of him, you felt like you’d accomplished something wonderful. But looking back, I see that it was part of his technique. I found out later I wasn’t the only one he was seeing at the time.”
“And you got pregnant.”
“Yes,” she whispered. “And when I told him that we would have to get married, he laughed at me. He wanted me to get an abortion. He said that I wasn’t mature enough to be a mother and that he wouldn’t let me trap him that way.”
Wes’s hand tightened.
“He went back to school after that, and I never saw him again. Just like that. He didn’t know or care what I had done with the baby.”
“What a fool,” he whispered. The words, the declaration, hung inconclusively in the night air. Was he reacting as a father, a friend, or a lover? she wondered. Finally Wes said, “But I’m glad it happened.”
“Why?”
“Because if it hadn’t been for him, I wouldn’t have wound up with Amy … or you.”
She closed her eyes, resisting the urge to latch on to the illusion of something that wasn’t hers. Could it be that he was falling in love with her? Could it be that she loved him? Could it be that this time that volatile emotion wouldn’t break her heart?
He tucked her hair behind her ear. “You’ve been through so much. Are you happy now, Laney?”
She squeezed her eyes more tightly. “Yes,” she whispered. “I’ll never be Patrice. I know that, but—”
“You’re different from Patrice,” he cut in firmly. “But that’s good. I need someone who’s different. If you were the same, it would be harder …”
Harder to do what? she wanted to ask. To forget Patrice? To fall in love again? But those were questions she had no right to ask.
He looked over at her, and she would have given every cent she owned to know what he was thinking. “You really do make everything easy, Laney.”
She couldn’t meet his eyes, for she couldn’t risk letting him see the hope rising in them.
“This all makes you uncomfortable, doesn’t it, Laney?”
“What?” she asked, making herself look at him.
“Anything that borders on … intimate? You’re afraid of me, aren’t you?”
She tried to find an honest answer, for she wasn’t certain herself. Keeping each other at arm’s length was safe, but it didn’t breed happiness. Yet the very thought of it growing into more left so much potential for heartache …
“I don’t want either of us to be hurt,” she whispered. “We’ve both had our share.”
“And I don’t want you to be uncomfortable,” he said. “We don’t have to sit here and keep wondering where this will lead. We could go to a movie, get some dinner, then go back home and sleep the way we’ve slept for the past few weeks. No pressure.”
She couldn’t hide the intense disappointment that fell over her, nor the intense relief. “OK,” she said with a smile.
With the pressure gone, they went out like two people at the threshold of a relationship, getting to know each other on a date, and forgetting the marriage that stood like a wall between them.
L
aney had expected her sense of well-being to be chased away when they arrived at Sherry’s the next morning to pick up Amy.
But the child seemed to have lost all her hostility of the previous day, and she bubbled over with stories about the movie, the popcorn balls she and Sherry had made, and the fact that she’d gotten to stay up until eleven o’clock. Her stories were addressed as exuberantly to Laney as they were to Wes, and when she disappeared into the bedroom to get her overnight case, Sherry took Laney aside.
“Don’t let her fool you. She spent most of the night with that little book you made for her. It was just what she needed, Laney.”
Laney saw that Sherry was right as Amy babbled all the way home, laughing and giggling. But when she suddenly grew serious as they arrived home and asked them to sit down, Laney held her breath in fear.
“I was thinking,” Amy said, as if she’d given it a great deal of thought, “that with school out soon and me being able to stay home with Laney every day, there isn’t going to be that much to do. Wouldn’t it be better if we lived at her house, where we could swim whenever we wanted, and I’d have that neat bedroom she fixed for me, and I could invite my friends over and …”
Laney’s hand came up to cover her mouth, and she turned to Wes, eager to share her joy with him. But the blank look on his face changed everything.
“No. We’re staying here. This is where we live.”
“But, Daddy, this house is too small. Why should we live here when we have a big house we could live in?”
“Because it’s our home,” he said sternly. “Besides, Laney’s house is for sale.”
“I could take it off the market,” Laney said quickly. Her eyes were pleading, entreating. “Wes, she wants to.”
“I don’t care,” he said, standing up. His mouth trembled. “
I
don’t want to.”
“But, Daddy—”
“I don’t want to discuss it anymore,” he said. And before another argument could be uttered, he went back to the bedroom and closed the door.
Amy stood with her arms crossed, gaping at the closed door, and turned back to Laney. “I just thought it would be nice,” she said, her lip quivering. “We don’t
have
to.”
Laney pulled Amy close and made her look into her eyes. “It’s hard for him to leave here,” she said quietly. “We have to give him more time.”
“OK,” Amy whispered with a dejected shrug. “I’ll go put my stuff away.”
Laney watched as Amy, her spirits suddenly lagging, vanished into her room. What happened? she wondered, astounded. How had she gone from the mountaintop to the barren valley? How had he given her such hope last night then turned his back on her this morning?
Quietly she slipped into the bedroom.
Wes was sitting on the bed, facing Patrice’s picture, pain and confusion etched in the lines of his face. “I’m sorry,” he said without looking at her.
“I know.” She sat down next to him on the bed. “I know it’s hard for you,” she whispered, glancing at Patrice’s picture. “But think of Amy, Wes. This is such a big step. It means she’s accepting our marriage. Maybe she’s even accepting me.”