A Daring Proposition (17 page)

“I see,” he said curtly. “The old self-sufficient Leigh, eh? But don’t forget, it’s my baby, too. And I’m concerned about Robert. I… Oh, hell, I’m late for a dinner with the Harrises, but I’ll call you tomorrow, okay?”

So, he wanted to keep up a connection—for the baby’s sake—and he cared about Robert, too. Good, let him talk to Robert then, between his dinners with Rita Harris. From that moment on, Leigh made herself unavailable to Brian. She didn’t read his emails. She told Robert to take his calls and say that she wasn’t in. “Don’t question me, Robert,” she pleaded. “It’s all over between Brian and me. I don’t want to discuss it.”

Even with the move and her deliberately unlisted phone number, Brian tracked her down somehow and called Robert regularly, at specific times that she guessed were prearranged. “I told you she had help for the moving… Why don’t you two settle this thing, anyway… If you care so damned much… The doctor isn’t sure…” Although Leigh couldn’t help overhearing snippets of conversation, she and Robert pretended the phone calls didn’t happen, and he never asked about Brian’s emails.

She survived spring in the new house, knowing Brian had directed the landscaping for it. She could not doubt it. The dogwood, crab apple and two plum trees blossomed, their heady scents permeating the grounds. The maples, careless about adding their leaves in the spring, finally succumbed to a steady stream of warm days, and whispering breezes shivered through the fresh green leaves. There was the scent of jonquils and hyacinths and of freshly mowed grass, and violets carpeted the floor of the woods to the back of the house. The landscape was designed for spring and for lovers, for memories not yet made and those that never would be.

The nights were the hardest to survive. She dreamed of Brian, over and over again. She dreamed of that Christmas in Minnesota, when Monster was a pup and Brian was so solicitous. She threw her arms around her dream lover, and he held her, just held her, for an eternity. Time swirled and they were on the museum steps, the waves of Lake Michigan catching the late afternoon sun. He kissed her and kept on kissing her, and she felt herself slowly descending into the cool silk waters of a pool on a day so hot…so hot. And making love the first time: the power, the velvet power of his hands! She would have staked her life that there was no such response in her, that her fear was unbridgeable, that she could never again bear being helpless at the hands of any man. But she
had
been helpless, and there had been no fear, no degradation. She had felt revered, loved, cherished when he made love to her. Yet it hadn’t meant a thing to him.

She always woke from the dreams with tears in her eyes. For those moments in the darkness, she hated the burden she carried. If she hadn’t been like this—big and burdensome and clumsily unattractive—she might possibly, just possibly, have risked all her pride and sanity on one last try to be with him. “I don’t want you,” he had said, and the endless refrain echoed over and over as she feverishly tried to keep busy. So how could he possibly want her as she was? Especially when he could have Rita, and any other woman he desired. Night after night, she told herself that this
had
to pass; she
had
to start living again.

Leigh was so accustomed to waking at the first light of dawn that the morning of June 7 seemed no different. Perhaps a little different, she thought wearily, as she stretched and snuggled tiredly against the pillow.

She’d seen Dr. Franklin the day before. In her usual no-nonsense manner, the obstetrician had told Leigh that she wanted to induce labor on the fifteenth—two weeks early. She didn’t want to let the twins take on too much weight in their crowded space. Reassuringly, Dr. Franklin had told Leigh that both babies had strong heartbeats…and then delivered the lecture Leigh had heard before: the one about the shadows under her eyes, about her being the only patient the doctor had to encourage to eat more.

Drowsily, Leigh noted now that it was raining outside, a gentle patter against the French doors that led to the patio outside her bedroom. The sound was lulling, hypnotic, and she found herself falling asleep again. At nine she startled awake, feeling more refreshed than she had in weeks. As quickly as she could, she washed and dressed, then ambled into the kitchen. “Robert?” She was almost smiling, anticipating his reaction to her oversleeping. He had been scolding her for weeks about her early risings, but she knew he would now have a comment like, “I see you
finally
got around to getting up?” or “It’s so late it’s nearly time to go back to bed!”

The kitchen, curiously, was empty. No fresh coffee, no breakfast dishes soaking, no paper, no crossword puzzle on the table.

Her smile faded. “Robert?” She opened the back door that led onto a cement patio. The smells of the morning rain were fresh and strong; the wrought-iron furniture still glistened with raindrops like crystals in the emerging sun. She closed the door.

“Robert?”

She peered into the library and opened the front door that faced the drive. From the distance, she could see the morning newspaper still in its yellow box and undoubtedly damp at the edges. Robert was nowhere to be seen.

Instinctively, her arms folded protectively around her stomach. She closed the front door and walked down the hall to Robert’s room. She knocked on the closed door, and received no answer.

“Robert?”

It was just as if he were asleep. His eyes were closed; he was lying on his back with one arm extended neatly over the covers. His face looked almost smooth again, with a far gentler expression than the one he usually wore.

Leigh sank down on the edge of the bed. She knew it had been coming for a long time; she had even prayed that it might end just this way, that there would be no pain. Still… “Oh, my friend,” she whispered softly. The sadness flowed over her in long, endless waves. This was Robert, a mixture of father and mother and friend, in a way no one else could ever duplicate. He had loved and protected her with a devotion that she had never understood, one she had always felt guilty about. She had loved him, yes, had seen that he was secure and cared for as best she could, but she had always felt that he did far more for her than she for him. He had been her anchor, her ballast.

The tears fell soundlessly, and Leigh rocked back and forth, her arms folded around her swelling stomach, allowing her grief its expression and her sorrow its freedom.

***

On the day before the funeral, she emailed Brian because she could not face a phone call. The message was simple and short, and overtly it asked for nothing. Just,
Brian, Robert died,
and the time and place of the funeral. She knew she owed him the notification, knew his fondness for the older man had been genuine. Yet she hoped all the same that he wouldn’t come.

Leigh did not think she could deal with any more emotion. The past few days had been bearable; she hadn’t had time to think but could only react as each problem came up. Dinner to be made; Monster to be walked; clothes to be washed; endless callers to entertain and all of the arrangements. Each was a problem she seemed to grope with blindly, as if the whole world was suddenly terrifyingly unfamiliar and frightening.

The nights had been much worse, filled with endless hours of despair and weariness. There was suddenly no feeling for the twins inside of her, no reason to get up in the morning. She could not cope; she had lost her best and only friend. Thinking herself independent and in control, she had never realized how much she relied on the old family retainer who had been so dear to her to see her through each day. Especially since she’d lost Brian. She had thought to leave him before he left her, but she hadn’t been able to cut him out of her heart. She had assumed time would ease the pain of that loss, but it hadn’t, and with the fresh loss of Robert, she found herself missing Brian more than ever. And over these past months, just the knowledge that Robert was in communication with Brian, even though she herself wasn’t, had been a strange comfort. Now all links were broken and she felt herself totally alone.

And so she waited through the long day of the funeral, feeling ever more certain that Brian wouldn’t come. She ought to feel relieved—she’d feared seeing him again—and yet, she was consumed with a sense of desolation.

Her attorney, Mr. Adams, drove her to the funeral and delivered the short and personal eulogy. Leigh refused to listen. There was nothing real about the box that was put in the ground—it had no relationship at all to the man she had known—and in a strangely detached way she resented the whole ceremony. She had few memories of Robert that were not good ones, and there was no question of putting them to rest, nor did she want to.

Mr. Adams drove her home in the middle of the afternoon, and then rather awkwardly invited himself in. He then proceeded to sit determinedly in a chair in the living room, talking monotonously of her father and events in the past when he had known Robert, when she was just a child. Leigh felt so weary and confused that she hardly recognized what he was doing; it was only as dinnertime approached and the white-haired attorney cleared his throat and offered to stay the night that she realized what was going on. Mr. Adams was doing his best to be kind; he was concerned about her being alone in this time of mourning.

“There’s absolutely no need,” she assured him. She wanted, in fact, to be by herself. “Mr. Adams, you’ve been wonderful to me over the last few days. I’m sorry I haven’t seemed more appreciative.”

“Didn’t expect you to be,” he said rather stiffly, and then paused. “I tried to contact Mr. Hathaway, Leigh. I called Florida, and I tried his office here in Chicago.”

“You shouldn’t have done that,” she said sharply. “You know I asked you—”

“Yes,” the attorney agreed. “I know.” Absently, he rubbed his forehead. “I’m afraid under the circumstances I found it difficult to think only as your legal adviser, Leigh. At any rate, I couldn’t get hold of your husband. That’s one of the reasons I offered to stay.”

Leigh apologized to Mr. Adams for her sharpness, but assured him that she could manage very well on her own. She ushered him out, and when the sound of his car engine finally faded down the drive, she simply leaned against the door for a long moment. The house was totally silent except for the ticking of a clock in the dining room. She had been waiting for this moment. She hadn’t been aware of it before, yet now she knew that she had been anticipating it and wondering exactly how the silence was going to affect her.

It was past five, and she had no more reason to hope or fear that anyone else was coming. Mindlessly, she heated some soup on the stove, fed the puppy, cleared away the clutter. She let Monster out, unloosed and brushed her hair, kicked off her shoes, but did not seem to have quite enough energy to get undressed yet. She let the puppy back in and closed the curtains against the late afternoon sun. Mechanical movements all of them, to block out that sound of silence. And suddenly there was nothing more to be done, and even Monster refused to create any further distractions, falling into an exhausted heap beneath a chair. Her condition conspired against her; her back hurt and she just had no energy left to invent tasks that would put off the quiet any longer.

She sat, finally, on the edge of the couch in the living room, and became part of the stillness. The shadows of daylight lengthened, blurred and finally faded with the sunset. Even the babies seemed asleep inside of her.

The rap on the door was so unexpected that she started at the sound of it. She momentarily debated the possibility of simply ignoring the visitor, but the knocking was persistent. Awkwardly, she got to her feet and ambled to the door.

Brian had a large brown sack in his hand. His light gray suit had an unaccustomed rumpled look to it, and his tie was improperly knotted. There were tired lines around his eyes, and his hair was disheveled, as if the wind had had its way with it.

Leigh’s detachment of the past few hours had been so complete that for a moment she could only stare disbelievingly at him. And suddenly she regretted, terribly, sending him that email because the first look of him immediately stirred her emotions, and she absolutely could not take any more pain, not now.

He looked back at her with an inscrutable gaze, and yet she thought she caught a glimpse of anguish, a pain that reflected her own, in his eyes before he brought the shutter down on them. His jaw tightened, and then just as quickly relaxed.

“Let me in, Red. I’ve got enough Chinese food in here for an army.”

It was Brian who switched on the lights, closed the door, led Leigh into the kitchen and searched through cupboards and drawers for dishes and utensils. He simply took over, in a manner she had almost forgotten. She could not seem to stop looking at him, but she could not say anything, either. He was thinner; gaunt planes stood out on his face, but his expression was as unfathomable as ever. She could not tell if he was glad to see her or sorry, if he had come out of a sense of duty or something more. In her mind and dreams these past months she had envisioned a thousand times over what she would say and do if she saw him again, but she had never imagined that she would be too tired and heart-worn to even think, or that her stomach would be so full and cumbersome, or that she would be so thoroughly unable to hide her feelings of vulnerability and wariness. She was always perfectly dressed in her dreams, slim and chic, with exactly the right words at the tip of her tongue and a nonchalance that was devastating.

Now she found herself seated across the table from him, the food on her plate untouched. With both a smile and an impatient sigh, he wedged his chair closer to hers, filling her fork with food and bringing it to her lips.

“Brian,” she protested. The rest of her response was stilled as the fork was not too gently shoved in. She snatched it away with a rueful glance at him. “I just made soup a little while ago.”

“I saw. It’s still on the stove. You never turned it on.”

So she ate, while he told her about the house she was living in, how he had come to design it, one of his first. “The kitchen gave me fits. At this point, as you already know, I’m an expert at rubbery eggs, but at the time I couldn’t boil water, so I had no idea of how to design a livable floor plan.” He smiled at her, a totally natural smile that she found herself returning.

When the dinner was over, she rose, awkwardly of course, her face averted so she wouldn’t have to see his reaction to her burgeoning figure. Brian got up at the same time and helped her clear the dishes. His hands brushed against her arms, moving her aside or reaching around her—sheerly accidental movements, and yet they sent her pulse racing uncomfortably. How
could
it be…the stirrings of desire, the craving to be held in his arms? It was like a physical pain, blotting out everything, even Robert.

“Leigh?”

She turned to him, feeling her heart race as she saw him searching her face as intently as she was searching his, drinking in the sight of her, the exact color of her hair, every plane and hollow of her face. Slowly he moved closer, and then she was cradled so tightly she could not breathe, and her heart was beating against his. She buried her face in his shirt.

“I couldn’t come sooner,” he murmured. “I didn’t know. I was on the project site when I got your email and then I had trouble getting a flight. I called, but there was no answer.”

“I love you, Brian.”

He tensed just a little and drew back, but his eyes never left her face.

“I didn’t want to ask for your help,” she continued painfully. “I hated it, knowing you’d come out of a sense of responsibility—I never wanted to be a responsibility to you. But when Robert died—”

“Oh, Leigh…”

“I hoped you wouldn’t come, but now that you’re here I have to know. You have to tell me, Brian,” she burst out passionately. “Why? Was it because we were so different you didn’t even want to try? Because I was so inexperienced, so inhibited? Or so unglamorous, compared to the other women? Was it Rita Harris? Was it because I like to cook? Are my eyes the wrong color?”

“Your eyes,” he said gravely, “are the perfect color, Leigh. They always were.” His fingers curled in her hair, burying themselves in that copper thickness. “You’re the sexiest lady I know, Red. And thank God you like to cook—we certainly couldn’t live on my rubbery eggs. As for Rita Harris—oh Lord, did you think…? I haven’t seen her since the last time I saw you, love. You’re it, Leigh. There’s been no other woman, I swear. I want no other woman.” She looked up at him with the shimmer of tears in her eyes. “I love you, Leigh.”

She had never heard that wrenching, painful tone in his voice before.

“But you sent me away, Brian. And all these months…”

“I had to, Leigh. Can’t you understand? We didn’t form this peculiar alliance of ours out of love. You’d never even gotten your feet wet in love before, and it’s so easy to mistake the first throes of passion for the real thing. That’s what I thought you were doing, and I had to make you leave before you broke your heart over someone you really didn’t love—me. I never meant to touch you, Red, but then I couldn’t stop myself. I wanted to be the one to show you love and how good it could be for you.”

“And you did,” Leigh said softly.

Tenderly, he kissed her. Then he drew back swiftly, his eyes boring into hers with a need so intense she wanted to cry. “But once wasn’t enough, not for me—I wanted to be the one
all
the time. But I’d rushed you, Leigh, stormed your defenses. Don’t you see, Red? It would have been taking advantage.”