Taking Her Time (7 page)

Still uncovered, Livingston was silent, his beady eyes locked on Tucker. The bird could say more with silence and a beady look than any human Tucker had ever known.

Fifteen minutes later, he was standing behind the town jail, watching Carly clean Norma's supper. The old tenderness was there for the girl he'd known, his first sweetheart. He leaned against the brick wall, nodded to Tanner and Gavin who had followed Norma. The boys had collected five more friends, and they watched the town legend clean fish. “She's good at it, isn't she, Tucker?” Tanner asked.

“Real good. And fast. We used to all go fishing and Carly could clean the whole mess in a half hour flat. We used to time her. She could outswim most of us, too. Her jackknife dive was a thing of beauty. Better go on home now, boys.” He glanced at Norma who was standing with one hand on her pistol butt. The pistol probably didn't have any bullets in it. Norma's other hand rested on her pepper spray, ready for a potential prison break.

Reluctantly, the boys rode away, still discussing how the jailbird would escape. Norma studied Tucker as he walked to the jail's back porch. “I guess she's cooled down enough now. What do you want me to do with her?”

Carly was obviously ignoring him, and Tucker's heart tightened at the sight of the tear streaks messing up the mud splatters on her face.

She had rinsed her hands in the bucket of fish water and dried them on the borrowed shirt. She handed the bowl of neatly cleaned and scored fillets to Norma. Then Carly sat with her knees up. Her head rested down on her crossed forearms.

Norma shook her head and spoke quietly. “She's way down, Tucker. Don't pick on her.”

“I'll take it from here, Norma, if that's okay.”

With a nod, Norma stepped inside the jail and closed the door.

“Go away, Tucker,” Carly whispered unevenly.

That's what he usually did when Carly was angry or upset—he left, unable to face her need for intimacy of the talking-relationship kind.

He braced himself for a new experience, because somehow he had to tear her out of his life, his mind and his body. “We may as well talk about this,” he said slowly and sat beside her on concrete steps.

Her words were muffled. “The whole town is probably talking about us now.”

“That's likely. They have before.” He wanted to place his hand on that shiny mussed hair, smoothing it, and rub the tension out of her shoulders and back. Tucker was surprised to see his hand hovering above Carly's head. He lowered it and gripped his jeaned knee firmly, anchoring his need to touch his ex-wife.

“I really did save your life by marrying you,” she said.

Tucker nodded; at the time her father hadn't been happy, and Billy Walker had a temper. “Thank you.”

She looked at him with suspicion. “Now you're just tormenting me.”

“I married you because I was afraid you'd get away from me. You always were a fast mover.” His words surprised him; but they rang true in the sweet summer air.

Her eyes widened. “You never said that before.”

He took a deep breath and decided to hand her the rest. Because he couldn't bear to look at her tear-streaked face, he looked up at the fading square of blue sky, wedged between the 1890s two-story buildings. “And I didn't think I could catch you. I appreciate that you did try, and I shouldn't have done some things like comparing your cooking to my mother's. What you could do best just ran in a different direction…. I turned off your laptop. You can finish off whatever you have going—that office emergency—and then you'd better leave.”

“You were embarrassed because we didn't have sex that first week.”

“We made up for that. Things change and so have we.” He looked down at Carly. “You smell like fish. Did you find what you were looking for at my house?”

She looked stunned and guilty for a just a heartbeat, before she recovered to come back at him. “
My
house. I don't know what you mean, but I want to make an offer to buy back my grandmother's house.”

“You're not getting it, Carly.”

“You could make a profit,” she insisted. “And you've been drinking. It's Saturday night. Why don't you go to what's-her-name blond-woman and think about selling to me?”

Tucker had just bared his scarred heart to his ex-wife, and she'd stepped right in and started wrangling over property values. He wouldn't let her know that he hadn't managed a relationship after her. Every woman had seemed dull in comparison.
He couldn't think of getting naked and having sex with anyone else. Since they'd rolled on Anna Belle's lawn, that was all he could think about doing with Carly.

Tucker forced himself to stand and stretch and breathe the alley's hovering scents of summer and fish. He wasn't certain how the intimate-talk business was supposed to go, but he'd just bared his heart, cleaning out a little of the ache, and got a real estate offer in return. His throat was dry and tight, but he managed, “I think I'll just do that. I don't appreciate you messing up my closets and drawers. Whatever you think you want was gone a long time ago.”

 

Carly could not let Tucker do that to her—just drop something on her that they'd wrangled about in their marriage, that had haunted her since—and walk away.

Tucker was doing just that—all six-foot-two-inches of broad shoulders, tapering down to narrow hips and long legs in those good-fitting jeans. He'd just given her the intimacy that she'd wanted and ached for in their young, short marriage—and he wasn't giving her a chance to return it. It was just like him to leave the field while he was ahead. “Do not take one more step, Tucker.”

He paused, straightened just a bit, then turned the corner into the back street and out of sight.

Carly sank down and let the evening shadows surround her, brooding on Tucker's admission and reflecting on the last bitterness of their marriage. She allowed her tears to drip down her face. Tucker had always been her friend and then her sweetheart, and she'd hurt him. He never lied and he'd just told her how his heart had bled. Valentine-proof lay in a box as worn and tired as she felt.

She amended the “never lied” fact. Tucker's “innocent date” with Ramona hadn't exactly been true.

When she heard the jail's back door scrape open, Carly said unevenly, “I feel like I'm in pieces.”

Norma's silence caused Carly to turn and look at the lady police-person, whose expression of sympathy was quickly shielded. “Uh-huh. I have to go home and fry up these fish. I'd rather you didn't sit on the jail's porch all night. Here's a plastic sack. Put the fish heads and guts in the trash can before you leave. Go home.”

“I have no home. You'll have to arrest me for vagrancy. Can I stay in the jail all night?”

“No.” The door closed and the alley's shadows deepened into night and Carly was alone.

And Tucker was taking his newly developed skill for intimacy-talk to his blond girlfriend. Another woman would be sharing it with him. He was the same and he was different. In the eleven years since they'd divorced and Carly had visited her grandmother, they'd never come close to each other—or said what they had to say for closure. Now Tucker had closed his part and left hers unfinished.

Just like the need to stake him out and have him.
It vibrated deep and warm inside her—the need to have Tucker. His expression had been tender as he looked down at her, and he was all hot and hungry—but there was something else tangling between them….

Carly sighed deeply and wearily cleared the jail's back steps of fish guts as she reviewed the day's events—her hunt for the diary, the frantic call from her office, rolling with Tucker on her grandmother's lawn and the humiliation of being hauled in by Norma had exhausted her.

So she wasn't in the mood to see Ramona, the minister's wife, the mother of five children and the pillar of the community, dressed in tight jeans and a red satin blouse and matching dancing boots. She wasn't wearing big hair now, but an all-sticking-out-ends cut that framed a pixielike face. “You're a pitiful sight, Carly Redford. I heard you were holed up back here after rolling on the front lawn with Tucker and playing suck-face with him.”

“Aren't there rules about how a preacher's wife and a mother is supposed to speak? Don't you have to bake a pie for a bazaar or something?”

Ramona's laughter ricocheted off the alley's brick walls. “You've been running away from a talk with me for years. Now, maybe you'll listen. Let me give you a ride back to Anna Belle's. You can clean up and we'll go dancing. If there's one thing I've learned about life, it's that when you think you can't face the world, you'd just better get up and do just that.”

After a deep breath, Ramona continued, “Of course, I wanted that fine young stud years ago, but he was hot for you and he resisted. But I nailed him one night when he was down and missing you. I knew when you came back from that weekend honeymoon and glared at me, that he'd finally told you. I knew you'd settle in and dig at that until you made him pay. You weren't in a listening mood then, or later. Then you up and took off and left this whole mess simmering. I've had to live with it.”

Ramona walked to Carly and studied her. “Maybe I'd better put a tarp on my car seat before you sit down…. Don't you dare lay any more guilt on me, Carly. I do not want to feel guilty about you and Tucker one day longer. Now pick yourself up and let's go dancing.”

“I can't. Tucker just said something that really got me. I don't know how to take it. He didn't give me a chance for a comeback.”

“If Tucker said it, he's thought it through and he means it, bottom-line.”

“I can't go dancing.”

“Sure, you can. You're the town legend. People expect anything from you. It's been real dull here without you. I need you to take the pressure off me. Their expectations are getting pretty high.”

Ramona's spiffy little red convertible sportscar wasn't the typical minister's wife's station wagon. She whipped around the city blocks until they squealed to a stop behind Carly's rented car at Anna Belle's house. While Carly showered, Ramona picked out dancing gear and laid it across Tucker's mussed bed. “You should use that bed, with Tucker in it, and loosen up a bit. Your neck got stiffer every time you came home to visit, or I would have told you about having Tucker sooner. Don't think for a minute that it was his fault. I knew what I was doing. He didn't.”

Carly stood still beneath the cosmetics that Ramona applied to repair her crying jag. “I've got a boyfriend. Tucker has probably cost me the chance to nab him. Gary is sensitive and kind. We're both up-and-coming business executives. We'd make good working partners.”

“I've got a husband. I love him. We argue and make up and balance out life pretty good. I've never looked at another man. Frank understands me, and my need to go dancing on a Saturday night and get my ration of romance without the kids jumping on us in the middle of good sex. They've learned how to pick the bedroom lock…. Frank still lights my fire. I'd say Tucker stil llights yours.”

“Tucker is probably at his blond girlfriend's. I am not aching for him. But he started something, and I'd like to finish it. And I want my grandmother's house. I was supposed to inherit it and Tucker bought it right out from under me.”

Ramona pushed the mascara wand into the tube and capped it very slowly. She seemed to be circling an answer for Carly, then she said, “You're going to have to figure out what is best for you, Carly. Just do it, like you always do. You can't change who you are. You've just got to deal with yourself.”

“You sound like my grandma.”

“Oh, yeah. Well, with my brood I'll probably be a grandmother soon enough. Face life, Carly. What's the way it is, just is. There's no going back. You just have to deal with what's on the tabletop now, and do the best you can. If your feelings about Tucker are still nagging at you, the best way is to have sex with him and see how you feel after that. You're both wiser now—and I did not believe for one minute that Tucker was planning to seduce you at the Last Inn Motel. I knew that movie star wanted you and I knew the party would be private. I also knew that I had to get to Simon Gifford first if I wanted to go to Hollywood. That's how I was back then.”

Ramona studied Carly in her jeans and long sleeve T-shirt with a red rose on the front. “You look good. But I can tell you, a man dying of a heart attack during sex did not make my day. You'd think that a movie star would keep himself in better condition.”

While Carly was feeling bruised and tired prior to that knowledge, her agile mind now came to a full stop. “You wouldn't be fibbing, would you?”

“The undertaker had a time getting that smile off Simon Gifford's face,” Ramona answered seriously.

Carly rubbed the headache beneath her temple. “It's been a long day. And I never should have let Tucker get ahead of me. I had my chance, but he pole-axed me with how he felt back then. I was so surprised that I missed my chance and made a bid for this house. I should have evened the score and told him how I felt—back then. Now, he's ahead. I am going to fix that the first chance I get. I don't like being left in anyone's dust.”