Once Around (9 page)

"
Lazy," he said. "At least that's what my pa used to say." Between swings of the belt buckle.
Lazy fucking good for nothing bastard . . .move that bony ass of yours outside and earn your damn keep . . .
He could still hear the words, all these years later.

Her gaze didn
't flicker. "How long has it been since you had a decent night's sleep?"

"
Hell," he said on the edge of a laugh. "A week. Maybe two. I don't need much sleep."

She tilted her head slightly to the right
, and a shaft of sunlight against the red-gold curls came near to blinding him. "You need more than you're getting."

"
There's a lot you need, too."

She looked down at her hands
, and he saw the way her whole body started to close in on itself like a morning glory come first light. Was she blushing? He didn't know women still did that.

"
That's not how I meant it," he said. "I'm talking about the yard."

"
I know," she said, recovering her poise. "You were right about this place. It's falling apart."

"
I didn't say it was falling apart. I said it needs tending." She needed tending, like a beautiful lost garden—

"
It needs more than tending. It needs a complete overhaul." She leaned forward, her tangle of curls tumbling over her shoulders. "I'd like to take you up on your offer."

A second passed while all the offers he might have made flashed
through his mind. But there was only one she knew about. "You want some yard work."

She nodded.
"Yard work, deck repair, whatever you think is fair compensation."

"
You'll get your money's worth."

"
I trust you," she said, then held out her right hand.

He clasped it in his. Her fingers were long and slender and strong. Her handshake was firm. He wanted to turn her hand palm up and trace circles with his tongue.

"This is great," she said, sitting back in the rocking chair. The curve of her bottom' fit the curve of the seat as if fashioned by the hand of God. "We both get what we want from it."

Not by a long shot
,
he thought.
Not even close.

#

Rafe returned the next day and mowed the lawn front and back. Molly weeded the flower beds and did some pruning, but fatigue swept over her before long, and she retreated inside. The truth was, the sight of him working in her yard unnerved her to the point where she didn't know where to look or for how long. The urge to drop to her knees in worship was almost unbearable. Much easier to hide out in the kitchen where she could pull down the shade and tell herself it was to keep out the sun.

Besides
, who needed the sun when she had her imagination to keep her warm. All she had to do was think about the way he looked, bare-chested and sweating in the sun, and she was on fire. Pulling down the shade didn't help. She wasn't even sure a cold shower would. She hoped he was a fast worker because she wasn't sure how much of this she could stand.

She
'd lived the last thirty years of her life without a single sexual fantasy, and now, when she was pregnant and alone, she couldn't close her eyes without feeling Rafe's hands on her breasts, his muscular legs covering hers, his mouth open and wet and hot—

Craziness
, that's what it was. Wasn't she in enough trouble as it was without adding sex to the mix? Her hormones had never given her any trouble before, and she wasn't about to let them get the upper hand now.

They worked out a schedule. He would keep the lawn mowed between now and the end of the growing season. He
'd take care of leaves. He'd repair the deck, take down the trees that had been damaged in the last big thunderstorm, then move inside to handle some of the odds and ends that needed doing. Maybe by the time he moved inside, she'd be used to having him around.

If not
, she'd have to consider moving.

She didn
't have to see him to be aware of his every move, every gesture. He was so unlike the other men in her life that she wondered if he was even part of the same species. He took up more space, for one thing. He was taller, broader of shoulder, more dazzling. There, she'd said it. He dazzled her. She feasted on the sight of him. She wondered what he would think if he knew the way she dreamed about him, the things they did, in the half light of dawn as she hovered between sleep and wakefulness.

This morning she
'd woken up to find her hand between her legs.

She now knew for a fact that you can blush when you're all alone.

He tapped on the back door around four o'clock. "I'm finished for the day," he said, wiping his forehead with the edge of his T-shirt. "I have a construction job tomorrow morning at the hospital but be back by three to start work on those trees."

"
You don't have to come by at all tomorrow," she said, noting the dark circles under his eyes. "Why don't you give yourself an afternoon off?"

"
I have too many afternoons off as it is," he said. "I'll be here by three."

#

It turned out she could set her watch by Rafe. If he said three, he was there at 2:59. If he said nine in the morning, you could bet he'd be there before
Good Morning America
signed off. She made sure he had coffee and cold drinks and cheap sandwiches. More than once she invited him in so he could escape the Indian summer heat, but each time he refused.

And each time he refused
, she breathed a huge sigh of relief. He made her uneasy in a way she
couldn't define. He was never anything but businesslike, even a bit distant. He thanked her for the drinks and sandwiches and ate them alone out on the back deck. It never occurred to her to take her own lunch out there and join him. They lived in very separate worlds, and it was better not to mix the two. At least that's how she read his body language when she was around him.. Maybe he didn't like her or couldn't stand her perfume or was afraid she'd talk his ear off about her almost ex-husband and her baby-to-be. Maybe he sensed she was lonely. That was usually enough to send most people packing.

Funny how she
'd thought getting married would put an end to being lonely. When she met Robert on their first day of high school, she'd believed she'd found her soul mate. Her best friend. The man she'd grow old beside. She'd never known anyone with ambition before. Her fractured family was a mix of opportunists, dreamers, and hard-luck cases with a private income. Not Robert. He was descended from a long line of achievers. He knew exactly what he wanted from life and how to get it and he swept Molly up in his tide of enthusiasm.
We're in this together,
he'd said as they planned his future.
We're a team.
Okay, maybe he hadn't said it in those words exactly, but he'd said it. Why else would she have signed on for life? She would work his way through law school and once he was established, her dream of a family would come true.

Sometimes she. ate her lunch standing up at the kitchen counter so she could look out the window and admire the way his
black hair gleamed almost blue in the noon sun. She told herself she ate at the counter because it was faster and easier, but that wasn't the truth.

She liked the way his hair looked in the sunlight.

She felt a little guilty about it. Not enough to stop watching him from the kitchen window, but enough to make her remember how hard she'd been on men who enjoyed watching her. Maybe that was part of the lure: Rafe Garrick didn't give her so much as a second glance. She'd rarely met a man who didn't react to her physical appearance in some way, and it unsettled her. Even Robert, at the end, had paid tribute to her looks. "You're a beautiful woman, Molly," he'd said as he walked out the door. "You won't have any trouble finding someone else."

Assuming the day would come when she actually wanted someone else.

#

Two weeks went by
, and she'd heard from Spencer Mackenzie three times since their first meeting. He never had much of anything to tell her. For some reason that didn't seem to matter to either one of them. They fell into easy conversation as if they'd known each other for years. In some ways they did. They knew many of the same people, had vacationed at the same places as children. They spoke a certain shorthand that needed no explanation. She and Robert had talked like that, in half sentences and coded phrases. She hadn't realized how much she'd missed it. Spencer had achieved the life her own husband had been aiming toward. She knew that life. She'd been part of it. Robert's dreams had been her own, and his success would have ultimately made her dreams possible. She would have had the family she'd always wanted.

Of course
, she didn't say any of that to Spencer. She knew better. If you ever wanted to know what divided the elite from the just plain rich, it was how they handled emotion. That was where her parents always got it wrong. They never could manage to tamp down all of those unruly feelings that kept spilling over at the most inopportune moments.

So she kept her emotions to herself. She still regretted crying in his office that first afternoon. He must be accustomed to it
, working on as many divorce cases as he did, but she wished she could reach back and erase the tape and start over again.

You cried in front of Rafe
, too. Why doesn't that bother you?

Rafe
's emotions were even less on display than Spencer's, and yet she hadn't felt the same degree of regret over her loss of composure. Embarrassment, yes, but not regret. They'd never had anything close to a real conversation.
Want some iced tea? Yeah, leave it on the back step. Sure hot out today, isn't it? Yep, it sure is.
They ate their sandwiches not fifty feet away from each other every single day of the week and they never once had lunch together. He sat outside under the maple tree while she sat inside at the secondhand card table he'd found for her but never shared.

She wouldn
't have thought twice about asking Spencer to join her, even for pb&j. Everything with him was easy and natural, as if she'd been there, done that, many times before. Everything about him was comfortably familiar. She understood his sense of humor, the way he phrased his sentences, even the way he paused before he answered so he could frame his response to its best advantage. That was the lawyer in him, and she understood. Robert had been like that, too, the good Robert. The one she'd married.

None of it made any sense
, which only proved that she was still a long way from looking for serious male companionship. No matter what her body told her whenever Rafe Garrick was near.

#

Molly made a trip into Manhattan to touch base with her contacts at her old publishing house. and to gather up as many slush-pile manuscripts as she could carry home. Over lunch with an associate, she pitched the idea of trying her hand at cover copy and got the go-ahead to send in some samples. Buoyed by the hope of additional income, she played with some concepts on the train ride home and was feeling happier than she had in months when she pulled into her driveway. The extra work wouldn't bring in close to as much money as she needed, but it was a start.

She was surprised to see that Rafe
's truck was still parked at the curb in front of her house when she got home. She glanced at her dashboard clock. It was nearly six.. He'd never stayed this late before. Usually he juggled two or three different jobs on a given day, and one of them always started around dinnertime. She went inside, tossed her packages on the kitchen counter, then opened the back door. The sight in front of her stopped her cold,

"
The deck's gone!" she exclaimed, staring at the pile of splintered redwood.

Rafe was busy down at the far end of the deck
, prying up nails with the business end of a claw hammer. "My other job canceled out on me. I figured I'd get started on this before it got too late in the year."

"
You tore down my. deck!" The yard looked as if a tornado had touched down west of the kitchen window.

"
No choice," he said. "The wood was too far gone. You have termites."

"
Don't say that!" She clapped her hands over her ears. "I really don't want to hear that."

"
I don't want to say it, but the fact is, you'd better have the house checked."

"
I can't afford termites and I can't afford a new deck," she said, feeling her heartbeat accelerate dangerously. "I can't even afford the nails, much less the lumber."

"
You worry too much." He looked up at her. A minor grin tilted the ends of his mouth. "Anybody ever tell you that?"