Not Quite Married Page 11
Sports were always useful. He worked out every day, played tennis and racquetball. He’d played football at Yale. Because there was nothing so satisfying as getting together with your peers and knocking each other around over a piece of pigskin.
As for sex, he and the wild streak had very few issues during the years he’d chased an absurdly long string of women. In fact, if he could have uninhibited sex with Clara right about now, the wild streak probably wouldn’t be all that obsessed with neutralizing whatever threat Ryan posed to his future with her. But Clara was in no condition for enthusiastic lovemaking—and they hadn’t reached that point again yet anyway.
And as for not giving a damn?
Not an option. Not when it came to Clara. He cared for her. A lot. From the very beginning, back on the island, she had somehow slipped right through all his carefully constructed and rigorously maintained defenses. Ending it when the vacation was over had failed to make him care less. In fact, as time went by, he only cared more.
And now there was the child, too.
Bottom line: he cared too much, she refused to marry him and they weren’t having sex. Even working out like a madman couldn’t neutralize the wild streak under these conditions. The wild streak needed an outlet. Spilling a little of Ryan’s blood would certainly take the pressure off.
Except that he’d gone and promised Clara he would get along with the guy. To her, that meant no violence.
It was a problem.
So at first, he tried not to think about it. He put the matter out of his mind. He ran four miles the next morning and the morning after that. Both days, he visited Quinn Bravo’s new gym, where he pushed his body to the limit, trying to open the valve a little and let out his pent-up frustration.
The next day, Thursday, he took Clara to see her doctor. The doctor looked her over and expressed approval that her blood pressure had gone down. Not only that, but the circles beneath her eyes had faded and her color had improved. The doctor’s prescription: Clara should keep on doing exactly what she’d been doing.
Clara groused all the way home. She’d had about enough, she said, of living between her bed and the couch. And next week, when she would see Dr. Kapur again, she planned to insist that the doctor allow her to get out of the house for at least a couple of hours each day.
Dalton tried to be sympathetic. He wasn’t really good at sympathy, but he understood that most people needed it. And for Clara, he was willing to make an effort to deliver it.
He said he knew she must be frustrated.
She muttered, “You try lying around the house all day when you should be getting things done. See how much you like it.”
He reminded her that her job right now was to take care of herself and the baby, that she was doing really well and she ought to focus on the positive, rather than on temporary restrictions, which were for her own good and the good of the baby.
That really pissed her off. The minute they got home, she went into her bedroom and slammed the door behind her.
So much for sympathy.
He considered whether or not to knock on the door and try to work it out with her. But he had a bad feeling that attempting to employ reason with her right then would only make things worse. So he went upstairs and got some work done.
At dinner, which she insisted on eating at the table, she was quiet. At first.
And then she shocked the hell out of him by putting down her fork, delicately wiping her mouth with her napkin and announcing, “Okay, I was a bitch this morning. It’s not your fault that I’m on bed rest and you were only trying to make me feel better. I’m sorry I jumped down your throat.”
He put down his own fork, wiped his mouth with his napkin and pushed back his chair.
Her eyes wide and worried, she watched him circle the table to get to her. When he reached her side, he held down his hand.
She gave him a look of pure suspicion before cautiously laying her fingers in his. He tugged her upright, grasping her chair with his free hand and sliding it back as she rose to her feet.
“What’s the matter?” she asked nervously.
“Not a thing.” He let go of her hand—so he could wrap his arms around her. “Apology accepted.”
She pressed her palms to his chest and refused to lift her gaze to his. “I just hate lying around all the time.” She stuck out her lower lip when she said it, which was way too damn cute.
He bent close. “Yes. I think you might have mentioned that once or twice already.”
Finally, she looked up at him. “You’re being wonderful to me.”
“Would you prefer it if I were meaner?” He wanted to kiss her. A lot. But he kept himself in check until he could be more certain of her mood. A kiss might set her off again.
“I...”
“You...?” He rubbed his hand up and down her spine, enjoying the shape of her under his palm and the feel of her belly—and their baby—pressed against him.
She murmured, “There are things I want to talk about.”
Talk. He probably should have known. “Such as?” He caught a lock of her hair and wrapped it slowly around a finger.
“Do you actually like being a banker?”
“Yes. I do.”
A puzzled frown. “Why?”
“I like variety in my work. Banking uses a number of different skill sets. A banker has to deal quickly, make decisions and act on them. I like that. I like a fast-moving environment. I’m tenacious and detail-oriented—both good qualities for a banker. But I’m also flexible. I don’t get stuck. If one way doesn’t work, I’ll come up with another. I like things rational. Banking is extremely rational. Also, in banking, there are clear rules. Bankers should be rule-followers. And I am. I know what’s right and I do it.”
A laugh burst out of her—and then she blushed and covered her mouth. “Sorry.”
He wasn’t offended. Why should he be? “No apology is necessary. You see more shades of gray in the world, and in life, than I do. I think we’re both aware of that.”
“Ah,” she said, her face glowing up at him.
He couldn’t resist. He dipped his head and took that sweet, soft mouth of hers. She stiffened.
But then she sighed and kissed him back.
It was a slow kiss, one he was careful not to sink too far into.
When he lifted his head, she said, “You realize the qualities you just named off could work in any number of fields.”
“But I’m an Ames. Born and bred to run the family bank. It’s convenient that I actually like doing what I was born to do—and are you through eating?”
When she nodded up at him, he scooped her high into his arms. At her squeak of protest, he suggested, “Let me help you get back to lying around.”
She made a delicate grunting sound. “As if I have a choice.”
He carried her to the sofa and gently set her down on it, quickly bending to remove her open-backed shoes and then lifting her legs up across the cushions. “There. You’re off your feet.”
She pulled a face, but she stayed where she was. “I have another question.”
He dropped into one of the wing chairs. “Of course, you do.”
“When I went to talk to Astrid...?”
Astrid. Hadn’t they said all they ever needed to say about her? Cautiously, he offered, “Yes?”
“Well, I asked her what went wrong between you two. She said that I should ask you. So, um, I am.” She swallowed and licked her plump lips and he wanted to kiss her some more. He wanted to pick her up in his arms again and carry her to her bedroom. He wanted to spend the night in her bed with her, with his body wrapped around hers, his hand on her belly, so he could feel it every time the baby moved. “Dalton, why did you and Astrid get divorced?”
He hardly knew where to begin. “Well. I suppose the simplest way to put it is that I didn’t understand her. I thought that she and I wanted the same things from our marriage. I had it all wrong.”
“Wrong, how?”
“I married Astrid because I liked her.”
“Liked?” She made the word sound as though it tasted bad.
He tried not to become annoyed with her attitude. “Yes. I liked Astrid. I respected her. She’s intelligent and I found her pleasant and easy to be with. She’s beautiful and well connected and she can really work a room. I was certain she would make me the perfect wife.”
Clara had her lips pressed tightly together. He knew she was trying really hard not to ask the big question.
He let her off the hook. “Go ahead. Say it.”
“I, um, notice that you’ve yet to use the word love...”
“It was time for me to get married.” He sounded stuffy and pompous even to his own hears. “Astrid was an excellent choice for a wife.”
“You’re saying that no, you didn’t love her?”
“As I said, I felt she would be a fine wife and that we would get along well together.”
“Dalton, how many times do I have to ask you? Did you ever tell your wife that you loved her?”
“I did. Yes. It seemed the right thing for a man to say to his wife.”
Clara groaned. “The right thing? Oh, Dalton. I don’t even know where to start.”
“Then don’t?” he suggested hopefully.
She drew in a slow breath and let it out hard. “Let me guess. You said that you loved her. But she didn’t believe you.”
“Correct. She didn’t believe me.”
“Because you didn’t love her. She was only a function to you. You married her for all the wrong reasons.”
He couldn’t let that go. “Excuse me. I admired her. I enjoyed being with her, found her intelligent and attractive. And I actually liked her. There was nothing wrong with my reasons.”
“Except that none of them mattered, because you didn’t love her, and for a marriage to work, it has to start with the love.”
“I disagree. Love is...unquantifiable. It’s not a basis for anything.”
“Oh, Dalton.” She shut her eyes, shook her head. “You just don’t get it. Love is the basis for everything.”
“I’ll say it again. Compatibility, friendship and mutual respect. Those are the best foundations for a successful marriage. And I’ll have you know that I was—and still am—very fond of Astrid.”
“Fond?” She looked at him as though he’d just poked a puppy with a sharp stick. “Fond?”
“Yes. Fond. And you can stop groaning and rolling your eyes. You’re right. For Astrid, love was the issue.”
“Of course love was the issue. It always is.”
He disagreed. But he knew that saying so wouldn’t help his case. Instead he said, “I thought highly of Astrid. I enjoyed being with her. But whatever kind of love she was looking for from me, she never got it. And so she left me. At first, I was furious. And then I was...bewildered. I’d thought we were on the same page about what we wanted from life—and from each other. I misunderstood her completely and never managed to give her what she wanted.”
Clara’s outraged expression had softened. She said in a marveling tone, as if it was big news, “So that’s what you meant on the island, when you said you didn’t want to keep seeing me because you would only screw it up—you meant you had screwed it up with Astrid and you were afraid it would only happen again with me.”
“Isn’t that exactly what I told you at the time?”
“But don’t you see? You telling me and my understanding it are not the same thing.”
Would he ever truly comprehend the female mind? Doubtful. “By the time I met you on the island, I was past the bewildered stage and had moved on to being reasonably certain that there was something wrong with me, something I just don’t get about women.”
“Well, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with you, Dalton. I really don’t. But I would definitely have to agree that there’s something you’re not getting about what a woman wants.”
Annoyance prickled along his skin. Patience, he told himself. He said, “It had been so good with you and me, I was hoping to skip the part where it all goes to hell.”
“Uh-uh,” she said, her sweet mouth all pursed up.
“Uh-uh, what?”
“At the time, I just didn’t get that. When you said you didn’t want to see me anymore because you would screw it up, I took it as one of those ‘It’s not you, it’s me’ lines, just a bunch of crap you put out there so I wouldn’t make a scene while you were dumping me.”
Carefully, he reminded her, “How could I dump you? We’d agreed on the two weeks together with no strings and—”
She cut him off with a sharply raised hand. “I remember the agreement. It’s way too clear in my mind. Please don’t tell me about it all over again.” Her cheeks were flushed.
“You’re getting upset. That’s not good for you.”
“You’re wrong. It’s good for me to get this off my chest.”
Was it? How? As if he knew. He was completely out of his depth here, and sinking fast.
She had more to say. “I was thirty years old on the island, Dalton. By thirty, if a woman isn’t happily married to her high school sweetheart, chances are she’s listened to a whole bunch of garbage lines and never wants to hear another one.”
“Didn’t I just tell you it wasn’t a line? Didn’t you just say that you finally understand that it wasn’t?”
“I... Yes.” She stared at him, narrow-eyed. And then she sagged back against the cushions and confessed, “All my life, I’ve been careful about romantic relationships, you know?”
An encouraging sound seemed appropriate there, so he made one. It worked. She continued. “I saw the way my mom suffered over my dad. Sometimes he would be gone for days at a time. It was like she never had a whole husband of her own. I didn’t want anything like that to happen to me. So I’ve been careful. Maybe too careful. I dated, I even had a couple of steady boyfriends. But I never let myself get in too deep. I had my family, and some really good friends. I had Rye.”
He felt his gut clench. He didn’t want to hear about her precious Rye—and she knew it.
“Dalton.” She said it softly, but her tone held rebuke. “It was never like that, with me and Rye.”
“Like what?” he demanded, before he had a chance to think about whether or not he could actually deal with her answer.
And then she said, “Before you, I slept with two other guys. Neither of them was Ryan. We’ve never been lovers, Rye and me. That’s just not who we are together. We’re friends. Best friends. Not friends with benefits. Not ever.”
The knot in his stomach untied itself, just like that. He felt very glad he’d asked. “Well, all right, then.” He prompted, “So you dated, but you never got in too deep with any guy...”
“That’s right.” She picked up her story where she’d left off. “And I’ve always been something of a workaholic. I knew I wanted my own restaurant and I drove myself to make that happen, then I drove myself harder to make the café a success. I didn’t start feeling like maybe I’d missed out on finding something good with a guy until last year. Suddenly, I was thirty and it occurred to me that maybe I was never going to find someone special. And then I went to the island and there you were and it was like...” Her sentence faded off.
And just when it was getting really interesting, too. “Keep going.”
She shook a finger at him. “Don’t you dare laugh.”
“I won’t.”
She lay back and spoke to the ceiling with a sigh. “It was like it was meant to be, you and me.”
Meant to be. He considered himself a practical man, in no way romantic. But meant to be sounded damn good coming from Clara.
She went on, “On the island, by the end of those two weeks we spent together, I was way too invested in my fantasies of how it would turn out with us.” She rolled her head toward him.
He captured her dark gaze. “I really blew it, huh?”
A smile ghosted across her mouth. “You could say that.”
“Well, yeah.” At least she said it softly. And her cheeks were sweetly flushed.
He asked, “Do you think that maybe you could let all that go now—or, if not now, possibly sometime in the near future?”
For several very long seconds, she only stared at him. He began to resign himself to being told that she could never forget that he’d turned her down on the island.
And then she held out her hand to him.
Now, there was a fine moment. He caught her fingers, got up from the chair and sat on the edge of the couch, beside her.
“I’m working on it,” she whispered.
His heart tap-danced in his chest. At that moment, he was absolutely certain that it was all going to work out. She would marry him, as she needed to do right now or sooner, for the sake of their little girl.
Impatience spiked within him, to get things settled, get a yes from her so they could move it along, get the license, step up in front of the preacher or the justice of the peace, have it all properly sorted out before the baby came.
And what about Denver? He needed to get her to move to Denver. And he didn’t delude himself. That would not be easy. The woman had deep roots in her hometown.
There was so much to work out. And the first step was getting her to say she would marry him.
But then she went on. “I’m glad we have this time together, to get to know each other in a deeper way, to find out if maybe we might have some sort of future together—I mean, beyond the whole coparenting thing.”
Maybe?
She hadn’t moved past maybe?
Maybe didn’t cut it. Not by a long shot.
“Dalton, is something wrong?” Those big eyes begged him to tell her what he knew damn well she didn’t want to hear.
He ordered himself not to get discouraged. They were making progress. And if he jumped down her throat now, he could lose the ground he’d gained. “Something wrong? No. Not a thing.”
She chided, “I don’t believe you.”
He bent close and whispered, “Nothing is wrong.”
And then he kissed her. Slowly. With feeling.
When he lifted his head, she gazed up at him dreamily.