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  He brought his mouth down on hers. His kiss was deep and hot and so exciting. It could almost banish her doubts and her fears. As he kissed her, he undressed her, peeling her clothes off, dropping them to the floor.

  “Tomorrow,” she whispered, as he guided her down to their bed. “It’s Easter. Stay home with us.”

  “I will,” he promised. “I will.”

  And he did. He stayed with them for all of the following day. In the morning, they went over to Celia’s and the adults hid Easter eggs right there in the big apartment. The kids hunted them down. They stayed for lunch and went back to their own place around two. When dinnertime came, they sent out for Chinese.

  Monday and Tuesday, Cleo hardly saw Fletcher, but Wednesday night, he had a dinner appointment with a couple of bigwigs. He took Cleo along. It wasn’t the most fun she’d ever had, being charming for strangers, playing the CEO’s wife. Still, she was at her husband’s side; they were spending the time together that she had so craved.

  As one day faded into the next, he did make an effort. He stayed home a little more and he made himself available for family time and for just the two of them.

  But Cleo still had the strangest, most troubling feeling that he was holding something back from her— that he kept his heart closed.

  And he’d yet to say again that he loved her. That did bother her.

  Should she just ask him? Over and over, she rehearsed how she might say it.

  Fletcher, you’ve only said you love me once, on the day you proposed. I can’t help wondering…do you? Love me, I mean?

  Ick.

  She knew she would only sound pitiful and needy. Really, shouldn’t a man have the sense to tell his wife he loved her, to let her know every once in a while that she was the woman who held his heart?

  If she was the woman who held his heart…

  Far back in her mind, Andrea’s words still taunted.

  Some men just aren’t the forever type… Once you’re caught, it can get old really fast….

  Oh, this whole thing was just so damn confusing. She needed…a sounding board, a little good advice.

  She trusted Celia absolutely. She could talk to her. But she wondered about the wisdom of revealing her marital issues to Fletcher’s sister-in-law. That didn’t seem right, to put Celia in the middle between her brother-in-law and his wife. So she kept her mouth shut.

  But then, on the first Friday in April, Jane and Jilly came back to town for a visit and Celia invited Cleo to her penthouse for lunch.

  “More wine?” Celia had brought the bottle into the living room after they’d left the table.

  Cleo put her hand over her glass. “Better not. Remember last time.”

  Jilly chuckled and held up her glass for a refill. “Well, I don’t know.” Celia filled the glass. “Last time worked out pretty well, as I remember. You got your worries off your chest. And then you ran into the man of your dreams in the hallway…and the rest, as they say, is history. All because of that second glass of wine.”

  “Hmm,” said Cleo. “I never thought of it that way….” Celia held up the bottle again. Cleo laughed. “Uh-uh. I mean it. I really will pass.”

  Celia grinned and set it on the coffee table. “It’s right here if you change your mind.”

  “Good to know.”

  Jane adjusted her maternity jumper over her burgeoning belly and reached for her glass of cranberry juice. “The main thing is that you’re in the family now. We’re all happy about that. Ashlyn deserves a wonderful mother like you. And I’ve always said that what Fletcher needs is the right wife.”

  Cleo sat forward and asked with a lot more urgency than she intended, “You really think I’m the right wife for him?”

  “Yes.” Jane replied with a firm nod. “I’m absolutely certain you’re the right woman for him.”

  “Sometimes, I have to admit, I wonder….”

  Jilly set down her wineglass. “Okay. What’s going on? Is something wrong?”

  Cleo looked from Jilly to Jane to Celia and back to Jilly again. “Oh, I wasn’t going to do this. I truly was not….”

  “Sure you were,” said Celia. “And it’s good that you were. Sometimes you just need to talk to a friend—or three, if they all happen to be available.”

  “It’s only…” Cleo’s voice wandered off into nothing again.

  Jane said, “Come on. It’s okay.”

  “You know you want to tell us,” said Jilly.

  “That’s right,” said Celia. “And we only want to help.”

  Cleo believed them. And she really did need to talk about it. “Well, sometimes I feel I don’t even know him.”

  “Not good,” murmured Jane.

  “That’s a problem,” agreed Jilly.

  Cleo elaborated. “We got married so fast. Maybe too fast. We should have taken it more slowly, should have gotten to know each other better…but we didn’t. And now, well, I feel as if I don’t have the faintest idea what’s in his heart. He doesn’t talk to me, not really. He’s not…open to me.” She shook her head, raked her fingers back through her hair. “Oh, God. I don’t know. Am I making any sense at all?”

  “You are,” said Celia.

  “We understand.” Jane was nodding. Jilly was, too.

  Cleo admitted, “Sometimes I wonder if this is my problem and not his. I mean, it’s not as if I grew up in a happy nuclear family, not as if I have a lot of experience with what makes a good marriage work. My mom raised me on her own. With her, there was always a new man, he was always the love of her life—until it was over and she went out looking for the next one. Maybe I just don’t get the way it is between a man and a woman when they’re married. But then I think of Danny and…”

  “Hello?” Jilly was frowning. “Who’s Danny?”

  “He was my boyfriend when I met Fletcher. I fell for Fletcher. And Danny broke it off with me. And he was right to break it off, because, from the moment I first saw Fletcher, I knew he was the man for me—though I fought it and fought it hard. But with Danny it was kind of like with you guys, here, now. Until Fletcher came on the scene and Danny and I started growing apart, I honestly felt that Danny was open to me, that he let me in his heart, you know?”

  “And you don’t feel that way with Fletcher?” Celia’s question was really more of a statement.

  “No, I don’t. I’m long-gone in love with him. I can’t imagine my life without him in it. He’s the only man for me and yet…” She pressed both hands against her cheeks. “Oh, how can I be so much in love with someone and still feel like I don’t know him at all?” She confessed low, “And I have to tell you guys, this is pretty much what Caitlin said would happen.”

  “Whoa.” Jilly knocked back a big slug of wine. “Caitlin. As in—” she gestured to Jane, to Celia and then to herself “—our mother-in-law?”

  Cleo nodded, feeling bleak. “Caitlin said she knew that Fletcher had secrets—and that she was sure I was the woman to open him up. So far, that is definitely not happening.”

  Celia was looking slightly bewildered. “I don’t get it. When did you talk to Caitlin about Fletcher?”

  “On my wedding day, in the ladies’ lounge at Club Rouge.”

  Celia blinked. “But…why?”

  “You’d have to ask Caitlin. She was in there powdering her nose. I walked in—and she wouldn’t let me go without a ‘woman-to-woman’ talk.”

  “Scar-ee,” declared Jilly.

  Jane asked the pertinent question. “What did Caitlin say?”

  Cleo filled them in.

  When she was through, Celia scoffed, “Well, trust Caitlin to make Fletcher’s natural reserve into some deep, dark secret he’s keeping from everyone.”

  “Now wait a minute.” Jane supported her big belly with a cradling hand and shifted on the sofa, sitting up a little straighter. “Caitlin can drive us nuts, but she is perceptive. You both know that she is.”

  “Oh, but come on,” groaned Jilly. “She’s also the kind who never
spoils a good story with too much hard fact.”

  Jane looked at Cleo. “Have you tried to talk to Fletcher? I mean, really made a serious effort, sat him down and explained to him that you feel cut off from him, that you want more time with him?”

  “Yes. I have. Last Sunday night. And I think the part about spending more time together might have actually sunk in. Since we talked—or rather, since I talked and he stared at me like I was from some other planet—he has been home more, with us more, me and Ashlyn.”

  Jilly said, “Okay. I can’t stop myself. I’ve gotta ask. The sex. Is it…?”

  Cleo shrugged. “Incredible. Fabulous. The earth moves and the stars explode.”

  “Oh. Well, then. Not a sex problem.”

  “No. I’d have to say, if sex made a marriage, I’d be the happiest woman on Earth. Scratch that—in the universe. Oh, I don’t know. If he would only say he loves me…”

  Glances ricocheted between the other three women. Then Jane cleared her throat. “He’s never said he loves you?”

  “Once. The morning he proposed. And I really believed him then. That day, I had no doubt he loved me completely, that I was everything he wanted in a woman and in a wife. But since then…”

  Jilly suggested, “Nada?”

  “That’s it. Nothing. Not a word—and you don’t need to ask if I say I love him. I do. All the time.”

  “Well.” Jane paused for another sip of juice. “Maybe that’s your next move.”

  Cleo swallowed. “Uh, what?”

  “Ask him if he loves you.”

  Jilly chuckled. “Jane’s always been the one for getting it right out there—except with Cade. She was a little bit backward when it came to Cade.”

  “A little backward.” Celia gave a delicate snort. “She was in total denial when it came to Cade.”

  “Maybe I was.” Jane patted her big tummy. “But look at us now.” She turned her dark glance to Cleo again. “I say, if it’s bothering you, ask him. Say, Fletcher I love you. Do you love me? And then shut up. Resist the urge to backpedal. And don’t you dare answer for him.”

  Jilly agreed. “Jane’s right.”

  Celia thought so, too. “Ask the question. And let him take it from there.”

  That night, Fletcher was supposed to be home at eight, but the hours stretched out as they so often did. Cleo went to bed.

  And eventually he joined her.

  He slid in beside her and took her in his arms and kissed her. She pulled back before he could do more and asked him the big question simply and directly.

  “Fletcher, I love you. Do you love me?”

  His eyes gleamed through the shadows. “Yes,” he whispered. “I do.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  “So that was it,” Cleo told Celia Sunday morning when their husbands were working, J.J. was napping and Ashlyn and Davey had wandered off to play in Ashlyn’s room. “Asked and answered, as they say on Law & Order.”

  “Did you believe him?”

  “I did.”

  “Well, then…”

  “He loves me,” Cleo said. “I’m willing to call that pretty much settled—he loves me.” She said it again, wondering who she was trying to convince.

  Celia wasn’t fooled. “But?”

  “He just won’t talk to me. And contrary to Caitlin’s prediction that I was the woman to open him up, I’m starting to think that’s never going to happen.”

  Celia shook her head. “I wish I had some brilliant suggestion for making things all better.”

  Cleo sighed. “You listen. It means a lot.”

  Maybe, Cleo thought as she lay in bed that night waiting for Fletcher, this really was her problem and not his. Maybe she wanted more from him than she had a right to ask.

  He’d said he loved her. She did believe him. Shouldn’t that be enough?

  Was she more damaged by her fatherless childhood than she’d understood until now? She couldn’t help doubting herself, wondering if the real issue here was that she hadn’t a clue how to love a man in any deep, abiding way, so she blamed the man for her own inadequacies.

  Fletcher worked hard. He was good to her and to his daughter. He made love to her often, with great skill and, much more important, with enthusiasm. Andrea Raye’s bitter remarks to the contrary, Fletcher wasn’t bored with his wife now that he’d caught her—at least, not in the sexual sense. Cleo believed he stayed true to her. She just couldn’t see him being so sexually attentive if he had some other woman on the side.

  So, truthfully, what was the matter here?

  What was the problem?

  Just maybe there was no problem. It could very well be that her doubts and dissatisfactions with her marriage were all in her head and she really needed to get the heck past them.

  Across the room the door to the hallway opened. A tall, lean figure slipped through. She watched his shadow moving toward her.

  When he reached the bed, she held up her arms.

  “What’s this?” he asked, his voice low and rough and oh-so-sexy.

  “Me,” she said. “Waiting for you.”

  It was all right, Cleo told herself over and over in the next couple of weeks. Even if sometimes she felt he was a million miles away from her, Fletcher did love her. He tried to make time to spend with her. His kisses swept her away.

  And there was Ashlyn, who now called her Mommy, who smiled more often as each day went by. Cleo couldn’t imagine how she’d ever gotten along without Ashlyn to light up her days as Fletcher did her nights.

  But now and then it would come to her, sharp as a stabbing knife, that things really weren’t as they should be with Fletcher. Sometimes it happened at night, when he would come home to her and make love to her and never say a word unless she spoke first.

  And sometimes it would happen when they were all three together at the breakfast table or in the evening after dinner when they’d retire to the family room. Cleo would glance over at him and he would have the strangest, saddest, most lost look on his handsome face—as if she and Ashlyn were on the other side of a thick glass wall from him, a wall both unbreakable and much too high to scale.

  She would know for certain at that moment that Caitlin had been right. Something terrible was troubling him. She would think, Tell me, my darling. You can trust me. You can…

  And the moment would pass. The look would vanish from his face as if it had never been. She would wonder if she’d seen that lost expression at all. Maybe she’d only wanted to see it, wanted to believe there was some secret he could share with her that would change everything, would make her feel close to him in that special, indefinable, emotional way.

  Then she missed her period.

  Cleo had the kind of menstrual cycle you could set your clock by. She was due the tenth. By the eighteenth, when her period still hadn’t come, she bought a home test. She took that test the next morning and got the answer she craved.

  Pregnant.

  Cleo floated through the day with a wide grin on her face. Both Megan, her associate director, and Kelly, her assistant at the original KinderWay, mentioned how cheerful she was that day. She smiled all the wider and told them yes, she was feeling terrific, on top of the world. She couldn’t wait for Fletcher to get home so she could share her wonderful news.

  A baby. They would have a baby. Another little one for her to love. Oh, she could just see Ashlyn as a big sister, see that little blue-or pink-wrapped bundle in those five-year-old arms….

  That night, after she put Ashlyn to bed, Cleo waited up in the living room until ten, longing for her husband to come through the door so she could throw herself into his arms, kiss him passionately and then whisper gleefully, It’s happened. I’m pregnant. We’ll have a baby by Christmas.

  He called at ten-fifteen to say he was sorry but he’d be another hour at least. So she went to bed and lay awake, waiting some more, rehearsing the way she would tell him the news.

  But as midnight went by and he still hadn’t come home, her mind to
ok a detour. She found herself thinking of Fletcher’s first wife, wondering how Belinda had told him that she was pregnant with the baby who would turn out to be Ashlyn. Hadn’t Fletcher said she’d asked for a divorce at the same time?

  So very sad. They’d split up before Ashlyn was born.

  It still nagged at Cleo, deep down, that he’d let Ashlyn vanish from his life like that. She really didn’t understand what had gone wrong between him and Belinda to make the split so complete that he’d even turned his back on his child.

  And yes, she did wonder if his problems in his first marriage had their roots in that emotional distance he maintained between himself and other people. He had told her that it was all about Belinda’s dislike of the gaming industry and how she missed her hometown. But he’d also admitted that he’d never had much time to spend with her.

  Cleo didn’t care a whole lot for the industry either. After the kind of childhood she’d known, she had more than a few ingrained prejudices against it; bright lights and late nights were just not her style.

  And Fletcher didn’t exactly lavish her with his time and undivided attention. If she had a nice hometown to go to and loving parents waiting there for her, she just might be drawn back to them. And once safe in the care of a family that cherished her, she might be reluctant to return to a world she disliked and a husband who wouldn’t—or couldn’t—love her the way she wanted to be loved.

  In the darkness Cleo blinked hard and shook her head against the doubts she could never quite banish.

  Just look at her. Going there again. Obsessing over that indefinable something that was lacking in her marriage. Wishing Fletcher could be someone he clearly wasn’t. She sat up, switched on the bedside lamp and grabbed the book on child development that waited on the nightstand.

  She’d just finished the first chapter when the door to the hallway opened—and there he was, the unknowable man she loved, dressed for the nightlife in one of his fifteen tailor-made tuxes, looking killer-handsome and just a little bit tired. She bookmarked her page and set the volume back on the nightstand.