The Misconception (29 page)

“How’d you get it?”

“Probably bumped into something,” he said absently, which wasn’t a satisfactory answer. She meant to question him further, but then he slowly lowered his head, and she went a little dizzy.

She shut her eyes and got ready for the onslaught of his lips, telling herself she should stop him but knowing she wouldn’t. A sensation of brightness penetrated her closed eyelids, which didn’t square with ordinary biological responses. She’d need him to kiss her more often so she could research the phenomenon.

Except she didn’t feel his mouth on hers. She opened one eye, then the next, and her pupils constricted. The lamp. He’d switched on the bedside lamp, throwing the previously dark room into brilliance.

“What do lightning bugs yell before they take off?” he asked.

She squinted at him. “Excuse me?”

“Lightning bugs.” He acted as though it were perfectly logical for him to walk into her bedroom after an absence of fifteen days and start talking about lightning bugs. “What do they yell before they take off?”

“I didn’t know lightning bugs could talk.”

Jax frowned. “Well, they can’t. But, if they could, what would they yell before they took off?”

She didn’t answer, so he did. “All system’s glow!”

She waited until he stopped laughing, thinking about what had just happened. She’d thought he intended to kiss her and instead. . . “Was that a joke?”

“Of course it was a joke. It was funny, wasn’t it?”

She didn’t answer, not that he seemed to expect her to.

He patted the bed beside her. “May I?”

Before she could ask may he what, he lowered himself onto the bed. The mattress compressed under his weight, throwing her thigh against his side. She inhaled sharply at the contact, and scooted away so they weren’t touching. This close, she could smell him, an intoxicating blend of shampoo, soap and man. Pheromones at work.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

She considered the soft light of concern in his eyes. Since he’d come back into her life, she’d made a point of being honest. She didn’t see any reason to stop now. “I wasn’t comfortable with the rush of sexual arousal that occurred when my thigh touched your side, so I moved away.”

His brown eyes brightened, the lines around his mouth deepened and he laughed. He tapped her on the nose. “You’re damn cute.”

Marietta eyed him suspiciously. She was an expert in evolutionary biology who dressed in tweed suits, had little use for makeup and pulled her hair back to get it out of the way. Cute was not the image she was trying to cultivate.

“It’s the hair, isn’t it?” Marietta had let it down before getting into bed. It was long and loose around her shoulders, the way it had been in that hotel room when they’d indulged themselves in mating.

“What’s the hair?” he asked.

“The reason you called me cute. Nobody’s ever said that to me before.”

He laughed again, captured a lock of her hair and twirled it around his finger, holding her to him in silken bondage. This time, he kissed her on the cheek before letting the hair unwind. “Then nobody’s taken a good look at you. With your hair down like that and wearing that piece-of-nothing nightgown, you look like a cute sex goddess.”

“Now you’re teasing me.”

“The way you blush is cute, too.” He touched cheeks that she knew had gone hot. She wasn’t sure whether to attribute the reaction to embarrassment or the sexual tumult brought about by his nearness. “Now are you going to tell me what’s wrong?”

“I already told you. I wasn’t comfortable with the rush of sexual—”

“I’m not asking why you moved away from me, silly,” he interrupted. “I’m asking why you’re in bed at eight o’clock at night.”

“Oh, that.” She tried to sound offhand. Considering her face felt as red as a chameleon hitching a ride on a fire engine, she couldn’t be fooling him.

“Yes, that,” he said.

“It’s nothing. Just a backache.”

No sooner had she said the words than the mattress sprang back into place. She gazed up in shock as Jax, who’d just gotten back, prepared to leave. Disappointment swirled through her like wind-blown snow in a blizzard. She tried to bank it, but couldn’t. “Where are you going?”

He gave her a cheeky look over his shoulder. “Are you saying you want me to stay?”

“No,” she denied, then realized he might misconstrue her answer as meaning she wanted him to leave. “It’s only that you just got here. You haven’t told me anything about your trip.”

“You want to know about my trip?”

“Well. . .” Marietta paused, considering his question. The answer she came up with almost knocked her back against the pillows. “I suppose I do.”

“Hold that thought.” He strode out of the room. Marietta watched him go, her hands on her hips. Of all the nerve! Marching into her bedroom; casually brushing her thigh with his big, sexy body; neglecting to do more than buss her on the cheek; and, striding back out.

Ten minutes later, when he strode back into her bedroom, this time without knocking, she was still quietly fuming. Until she saw what he was carrying.“Is that a heating pad?”

“Uh, huh. I used the microwave, but it still took me a while to warm it up.” He came closer to the bed. “Now lean forward.”

She did, and he propped the heating pad behind her back. Soothing warmth immediately assailed her, chasing away the dull ache. She closed her eyes, savoring the feeling. When she opened them, he was studying her. She couldn’t help but smile at him. She didn’t even try not to. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.” He sank back down on the bed. This time, when her thigh brushed his side, she didn’t move. Instead, she luxuriated in the same delicious warmth that spread through her back, even though this time the cause was strictly sexual.

“I want to thank you, too,” he said.

“For what?”

“I listened to you on
All Things Considered
.” He paused. “I was prepared to hear you say that babies don’t need their fathers, but you didn’t. I wondered why.”

She could tell him the omission was coincidental, but she wouldn’t lie. She owed it to him to try to be honest, even though she was still sorting out her thoughts on the subject.

“I didn’t think, under the circumstances, that it would have been the right thing to do.” She paused, looked down at the bed, cleared her throat. “The males in some species of animals share the raising of their young with the females. After the female emperor penguin hatches her egg, for example, she goes in search of food and leaves the male holding the egg for nine weeks.”

He grinned and brushed his knuckles against her cheek. “In our case, I think maybe you better send me off in search of the food. I wouldn’t know what to do with your egg.”

“Of course you wouldn’t,” she answered, refusing to be charmed. “The emperor penguin has a fur-lined pouch on his feet. You don’t. My point is that Father Penguin helps with the feeding and care after the baby is born as well.”

He tipped her chin up so she had to look at him. “Are you trying to say you think I’d make as good a father as a penguin?”

She swallowed, bit her lip, thought about that. Then she nodded. Very slowly, he kissed the tips of his fingers, pressed them against her lips and smiled. “Thank you, again.”

“You’re welcome, again,” she whispered, fighting the urge to grab him by the shoulders and pull his mouth to hers. What did a girl have to do to get a kiss?

“This doesn’t mean I agree with what you said in that interview,” he continued, as though he wasn’t thinking about kissing her at all. “I don’t believe men are as prone to infidelity as you think.”

Marietta stopped thinking about kissing him. Instead, she thought of her former boyfriends, of Ryan Caminetti, of her father. “Yes,” she said firmly, “they are.”

He kept his eyes steady on hers. “I haven’t slept with anyone else since I’ve met you.”

Something joyous leapt in Marietta, but she squashed it. She needed to think logically; biologically, to be specific. “You’re talking about short-term fidelity. What I think is impossible is long-term fidelity.”

The night before he’d left for his business trip, he asked who’d hurt her, and she refused to answer. Now, he didn’t say anything, and that very fact pierced her armor. She took a deep breath. Then she took a chance.

“I had this boyfriend in high school named Bobby Lancer. My friends were envious because he was always writing me love poems and leaving little surprises in my locker. I thought we were the perfect couple until the senior prom.” She cleared her throat. “I remember it like it was yesterday. Bobby wore a white tuxedo and I had on this bubblegum-pink dress with my hair in an updo. I was so happy until I found him, without the tuxedo, in the back seat of my car with Betty Jo Kowalski.”

Marietta took a breath and stared down at her hands. Now that she’d started, she might as well tell the rest. “I was careful not to get serious about anybody for a long time. Then, in my junior year of college, I let another biology major talk me into moving in with him. I actually thought a love of biology was a positive trait until I caught him indulging it with a hot little number in our bed.”

She glanced up at Jax for a reaction and saw empathy on his face. “They were boys, Marietta,” he said. “Not men.”

The bitterness she always tried so hard to bank spilled into her voice. “My father wasn’t a boy, and for ten years he met Elvira Thorton at the Ramada Inn every Wednesday afternoon. On Mondays, he met Liz Applegate. I ran into him with different women so many times I can’t even remember all of their names.”

Jax reached out and took her hand.

“He used to call my mother his best girl and tell her how much he loved her,” Marietta said. “She always believed his flimsy excuses when he didn’t come home on time or when he missed some important family event. She might have kept on lying to herself about how he was spending his time if he hadn’t had a heart attack and died when he was in bed with another woman.”

Jax squeezed her hand, prompting her to go on.

“When she was free of him, I thought she’d finally be able to live a little, to enjoy herself,” Marietta said, her voice quivering. “But she died six months later of a brain aneurysm.”

With her free hand she brushed rough fingers over the tears on her cheeks, angered that her father’s philandering still hurt years after she’d determined the biological reasoning behind his acts.

“What happened to your parents is terrible,” Jax said softly. “But just because your father was unfaithful doesn’t mean all men are unfaithful.”

“Oh, come on.” Marietta jerked her hand back from his. “Then let’s talk about
your
father. Was
he
faithful to your mother?”

Jax dropped his head and didn’t raise it for long moments. His brown eyes were flat, his expression as serious as she’d ever seen it. “I never knew my father. I don’t even know his name.”

His pain came through louder than the mating call of a bellowing alligator. Ignoring it was impossible. She reached out, stroked his cheek, took
his
hand. “I’m. . . I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, me, too. I used to cry myself to sleep when I was a little kid. I couldn’t understand why I didn’t have a father like everybody else. Later, when I got older, I played sports. I’d look into the stands at every game, watching the other fathers cheer for their sons. Every time, I’d think that maybe my dad would show up to cheer for me. He never did. Even if he had, I wouldn’t have recognized him. To this day, I don’t know what he looks like.”

“But I thought you had younger brothers,” Marietta said, no longer afraid to show that she was interested.

“They’re my half-brothers. We have the same mother, but different fathers. Not that theirs was much better than mine. He only stayed around long enough to get my mother pregnant twice in a little more than a year.” Jax paused. “Billy’s nineteen, and Drew’s eighteen. That bastard who abandoned them missed out on seeing two great kids grow up.”

Marietta could barely speak over the lump in her throat, because now she knew why he was so insistent on being part of their baby’s life. He didn’t understand that having a father in the home didn’t ensure a happy childhood.