Adding Up to Marriage (12 page)

“I'll let you know once I've woken up. And for pity's sake!” Jewel swiped the carton from him a split-second before the open spout reached his mouth. “That's disgusting! Here.” She plunked a glass in front of him and poured juice into it. “Welcome to civilization—”

“Aaron?” Silas said, shrugging into an old leather jacket as he came into the kitchen. “Did Jewel go get you…? Oh.” His gaze scraped her jammies and ratty robe. Her uncombed hair. Yeah, she was ready for her photo shoot, all righty. One side of his mouth tilted up and her stomach went flippity flop. “I'm guessing not.”

How was it, she wondered, that two people could have a lengthy conversation about why nothing was going to
happen between them—whether those actual words were used or not—only to have said conversation somehow turn and bite them both in the butt? At least, hers certainly had chomp marks on it. Whether Silas's did or not, she couldn't say. For sure.

Then he did the gaze-scraping thing again, and she thought,
Oh, for heaven's sake—I look like hell on a bad day! Get over it!
and as if he could read her mind his grin stretched a little farther, and she knew her sleepless night had not been without cause. What on
earth
had possessed her to admit she'd been playing the airhead on purpose to throw Silas off the scent? All that folderol about seat belts notwithstanding.

“Pancakes okay with everybody?” she said, slamming the griddle onto the burner, making all parties present flinch, including the dog, which only seemed fair considering the state they'd put her in. Except for the dog.

“Yeah, sure—”

“Cool.”

Because for
hours
she'd lain awake with one word scrolling across her brain like those dumb CNN headlines at the bottom of the TV screen: Why…why…. why…?

Why had she blabbed like that? And why to Silas? And why, why did Silas care? And why did she care, whether Silas cared or not?

One seriously messed up chick to go, please.

Deciding she'd clobber with the griddle the next person dumb enough to initiate early-morning banter, she got out pancake ingredients, made batter, slapped syrup and plates and flatware on the table, made pancakes, served pancakes, and drank copious amounts of coffee whilst glaring at the two males at the kitchen table. Who, it pained her to note, seemed either unaware of her grumpiness or were taking great pains to ignore it.

Nothing worse than an unappreciated snit.

Then, noticing the time, she went in to rouse Ollie. Not because she had to, but because small, sweet, sleepy boys—even groggy, grouchy ones—were far preferable to the big, heartbreaking, wide-awake ones currently yukking it up over her pancakes.

Okay, they weren't exactly yukking it up. In fact, the conversation sounded pretty darned serious. A conversation
she
should be having with her brother, not Silas. And would, as soon as she had a chance. And yet…

“Go 'way,” Ollie now mumbled, burrowing farther underneath his covers. “I'm sleepy.”

Sitting on the edge of his bed, Jewel curled herself around the little boy, gently tickling him through two inches of polyester fiber filling. “I know, sugar, but you have to get ready for school.”

“Don'wannagotoschool.”

“There's pancakes.”

One eye peeked over the comforter edge, underneath a fan of electrified blond hair. “With choc'late chips? And whipped cream?”

“Only if you get to the table by the time…” She tapped her finger on the face of the digital clock by his bed. “The number on this side of the dots turns to ten.”

“Pancakes?” Tad bellowed from across the room, his covers flying as he scrambled out of bed and charged across the hall to the bathroom.

“Hey! Me, first!” Ollie said, stomping after him, where the boys held a brief battle for first toilet rights—Jewel did not want to know—before they torpedoed back to their respective dressers for clean clothes. Or, in Ollie's case, the jumble of jeans, hoodies and T-shirts beside his bed—Silas's single concession to messy, apparently. A second
later Tad appeared in front of her, apparently no match for the buttons on his western-style shirt.

She drew him closer, her heart squeezing at his puckered frown, then his sweet, baby-toothed smile as she showed him how to guide the slippery buttons through the holes. “Did it, yay!” he shouted, pumping his fist, then taking a swing at his brother, just because he could. A swing that was reciprocated, naturally, and then they were wrassling in the pile of clothes, the dog barking and trying to get in on the act, honestly, until Jewel waded into the fracas to redirect their energy into pulling their beds together and getting their shoes on.

And she thought about how patient Silas was with these two fireballs, what a good father he was—what a good man, period—and that
if
she'd been in the market for a husband and potential father of her own hypothetical children, if
he'd
been in the market for a potential stepmom for the ones he already had, he'd definitely be in the running.

Even so, as she broke up yet another tussle—seriously considering rubbing them down with dryer sheets to keep them from clinging to each other—she thought about what Silas had said about her needing to learn how to let somebody else take care of her. But the thing was, what he didn't understand—what nobody did—was that it wasn't that she didn't know
how
to let somebody else take care of her.

It was how much it hurt when they stopped.

 

Silas watched the teen inhale his pancakes as if buzzards were circling overhead, waiting to swoop. His plate clean, he cast a longing glance at the stove. “Is there more?”

“There's batter and a griddle. Have at it.”

His gaze swung to Silas's. “Uh…cooking's not exactly my thing? Ramen and pop-tarts is pretty much my limit.”

“Then this is your lucky day.”

“Why can't I wait for Jewel? Be…cause,” he said at Silas's you-get-one-guess look, “she's in a really bad mood?”

“That would be it. Go on, I'll talk you through it. You call your Dad?” Silas asked as, with a huge
why-me?
breath, Aaron dragged himself over to the stove.

“Yeah. His cell and the landline, got voice mail both times. What's first?”

“Give the griddle a squirt of the cooking spray, put the flame on medium high, wait until the griddle begins to smoke. Did you try each phone more than once?”

Shaggy hair bounced when he nodded. “I told you he doesn't care…okay, it's smoking. Next?”

“Pour the batter onto the griddle?”

“Oh. Yeah.” The griddle sizzled. “How do I know when to flip 'em?”

“When the bubbles have all popped and the pancakes look dry around the edges.”

Eyes glued to the pancakes, Aaron slouched in front of the stove, one hand stuffed in the pocket of his droopy cargo pants, the other tapping the spatula against the edge of the counter. “Jewel's mad because of me, huh?”

Among other things, Silas imagined. Like, for instance, that hormone-riddled do-si-do at the end of their little talk last night. Then to give her that once-over a few minutes ago…

Dumb.

“You showing up like this isn't exactly making her life easier, no,” Silas said, and the boy banged the spatula harder.

“She's…different than I expected. In some ways, anyway.”

“Last time you saw her,” Silas pointed out, “she was
barely older than you are now. Big difference between sixteen and twenty-five.”

“Yeah, I know. In my head, anyway. But I thought…I dunno. I guess I figured she could still make things better somehow. Like she always used to. Stupid, huh?”

“And trust me, if she could, she would. Even so…” Silas picked up the gaming magazine the boy had been leafing through as he ate, only to put it back down when he realized it may as well have been written in Sanskrit. “It sounds like she's been taking care of other people her whole life. Don't you think it's time she took care of herself?”

More banging. Then: “Yeah, maybe you're right. Doesn't solve my problem, though.”

“True. But that doesn't mean we can't.”

That got a funny look. “We?”

“You're in my house, eating my pancakes.” Silas shrugged. “So, yeah.
We.
”

Aaron grinned, then turned back to the griddle. A few seconds later, Silas heard the scrape of spatula against Teflon, followed by, “Dude! Looks like a real pancake and everything! And…whoo-hoo! Did it again. Hey—you think it'd be okay if I make some for the kids since I'm on a roll, here?”

“Go for it.”

Soon after, said kids vroomed into the kitchen, spilling half their already-poured juice as they chugged it down. “Jewel said there's pancakes?” Tad asked around Silas's taking a napkin to the child's mouth and chin.

“Yeah,” she said as she reappeared, still a mess. Still cute. Still, he was guessing, grouchy. “Just give me a minute—”

“Already done,” Aaron said, plunking piled plates in front of each child. Of course, then the boys scrapped over who got the syrup and whipped cream first, until Jewel
grabbed both out of their hands with an amazingly strong
“Hey!”
for such a wee thing, giving them the same look he'd seen a million times on his mother's face, after which they planted their bottoms back on their chairs.

“Dudes,” Aaron said, shaking his head as he forked in another bite. “Trust me, that's a ‘pull that again and you won't see pancakes again until you're eighty' look.”

Coughing to cover his laugh, Silas pushed away from the table and carried his plate to the sink. “Impressive,” he whispered to Jewel, standing two feet away as she refilled her coffee cup.

“Kids need limits,” she said quietly, not looking at him, both hands clamped around her mug as she sipped. “Chaos sucks.”

“Or rules, depending on your point of view.”

Blowing a short laugh through her nose, she almost smiled. But he could tell she was an inch away from buckling underneath this new pressure. He also knew she'd cut off a limb before admitting it.

“C'n we have more whipped cream, Jewel?” Ollie asked, twisted around in his chair and peeking through the rungs like a caged monkey. “We'll be good, promise.”

“Yeah. Promise,” Tad added, nodding like a bobble-head.

Jewel cast Silas a bemused glance, then turned, clearly as much of a softie as Silas. “Okay…but only a little. No, let Aaron do it,” she said, adding more milk to the batter to stretch it for her own breakfast.

“You do realize,” Silas said as whoops of approval masked the sound of Aaron's smothering the pancakes with whipped cream, “your brother's take on ‘a little' probably doesn't match yours?”

“Don't be so sure about that,” she said, only her joke fell flatter than the puny pancakes on the griddle.

“Jewel—?”

“What am I gonna do with him?” she said softly, achingly, flooding her pancakes with syrup. Then she turned, leaning against the counter to eat them, watching Aaron goof around with Silas's two like they'd all known each other forever. “If Keith really is as uncaring as Aaron says…” She shook her head, her eyes lowered, before lifting them again to Silas. “He's my heart, Silas. Has been from the first moment I laid eyes on him. And I look at him now,” she said, returning her gaze to the giggling boys, “and I think…that's what he should have had all along. Or something close to it, at least. A
real
family. Not a succession of so-called parents who dragged their kids behind them like…”

She didn't, or couldn't, finish her sentence. Not that she had to.

“He's a good kid,” she said after a moment. “He deserves better. And it
kills
me that I can't give that to him.”

Ah, hell. At that moment, the only thing keeping Silas from taking her into his arms was their audience. But when she set her empty plate on the counter, he did reach for her hand, earning him a very startled glance that dovetailed nicely with his own reaction—that her openness, her honesty, her uncompromising integrity were breaching defenses he'd assumed were virtually impenetrable even a few weeks before. That her being here felt so good, so
right,
as though…

“You have one of the biggest hearts of anyone I've ever met,” he said, holding her gaze captive in his. Then he let go. You know, before the moment turned awkward. Before he said something really stupid, like about how she deserved better, too. About how, maybe, he could do something about that, if she let him.

Because it hadn't taken but a second for surprise to turn
to wariness to turn to something close to terror in her eyes, that his simple gesture of concern and support might mean something…more. Something she couldn't possibly deal with right now. Maybe not ever.

Oh, yeah, he understood that look, all right. All too well. Since not that long ago he'd been right there with her in No Damn Way Land. But how could he watch her with his kids, with her brother—heck, with anyone she came in contact with—and not think it might be nice to have her compassion and grace and courage and, yes, craziness in his life, in his kids' lives, on a regular basis?

“Thank you,” she said with one of those tiny smiles, then looked away, once more cradling her coffee mug in her hands. “Except that big heart is exactly what keeps getting me in trouble.”

Silas stared at her profile for a long moment, knowing he should respond but having no earthly idea what to say that wouldn't sound trite. Or like he was brushing off her fears as silly. So instead he called Ollie to get his jacket and go out to the car.

“I'll check in at lunch,” he said, digging his keys out of his pocket, “but you need anything before then? You call me. Promise?”