All of Me (31 page)

The temperature in the lodge grew hotter. Sweat beaded Evie’s brow, her upper lip, the flat space between her breasts.

Baby, baby, baby.

The bearskin rug felt luxuriously sensual against her bare butt. Smoke swirled upward, funneling through the flue and out
the hole in the roof.

Baby, baby, baby.

She waited. Prayed. Minutes passed. Finally an hour.

Nothing happened.

Her butt was growing numb, her entire body was now bathed in sweat, and the incessant drumbeating was getting on her nerves.
What was she doing wrong?

You don’t believe.

The thought came to her from the air, but it sounded exactly as if Ridley had said it. Startled, Evie looked toward the door.
But it remained closed.

She thought of the baby she wanted. Wrapped her empty arms around her chest. She thought of her husband asleep in their king-sized
bed. Tears pricked at the back of her eyelids.

You gotta have faith.

Evie took a deep, shuddering breath and let it out slowly. The languid, heated smoke snaked throughout her body. Her muscles
relaxed; her head went comfortably numb.

Buzzy. She felt all warm and buzzy.

Smoke grew thicker inside the room. The smell of piñon wood was overpowering. And the drums, they just kept beating.
Pound, pound, pound.

Baby, baby, baby.

Her eyelids drooped heavily. She coughed, blinked.

Then, in the haze of smoke, she saw something.

A baby.

Evie smiled immediately and joy contracted her stomach, but as she watched, a woman came and picked up the baby and disappeared
into the cloud of smoke.

Then suddenly she was surrounded by children. Babies, toddlers, little boys and girls in Easter attire. They were standing
on the lawn of the White House. It was the annual Easter Egg hunt. All the children had mothers who were carrying baskets
heaped high with eggs.

And there was Evie, standing alone, watching the event take place all by herself. No child at her side, no baby in a stroller,
no round pregnant belly like many of the young mothers. She realized suddenly that at thirty-five, she was the oldest woman
on the White House lawn.

Tears spilled down her face, and a wrenching sob squeezed her throat. She looked down at the basket that she realized was
looped over her right arm. Inside, atop the bright green artificial grass, were three tiny white eggs.

Evie threw back her head and howled with grief. The vision was clear enough. She did not have a lush full basket of eggs.
There were no babies in her future, no children of her own flesh and blood to love. She was a failure as a woman.

The pain was horrible.

Evie drew her knees to her chest and let the tears flow. Ridley was right. She shouldn’t have come in here. Shouldn’t have
seen what she’d just seen. Shouldn’t have learned the truth this way. Alone. Without him to comfort her.

“Evie!”

She jerked her head toward the door. Saw her big man standing there with a deep frown cutting into his brow, anger tightening
his jaw. With his wild, dark hair falling loose to his shoulders, he looked all the world like a surly black bear. Her heart
galloped.

“What in the hell do you think you’re doing in here?” Ridley growled.

In that moment, Evie knew she’d crossed the line and there was no way she could step back across.

F
or three days, Jillian and Tuck were trapped inside the lake house together while the blizzard of the decade raged outside.

On the second day, the electricity went out. Tuck kept the fire in the fireplace roaring. They played chess by candlelight.
Jillian beat him seventeen games in a row before he vowed never to play her again. They roasted marshmallows over the blaze
and brewed up hot chocolate over the gas stove. They listened to the weather report on the radio. They made stew and cornbread.
They drank pots of coffee and sat huddled under a blanket, watching
When Harry Met Sally
on Tuck’s DVD player until the batteries gave out.

“Do you think men and women can simply be friends?” Jillian asked him when the movie was over. They were sitting side by side
on the couch, Mutt sleeping at their feet.

Tuck shrugged. “Sure.”

“You don’t buy into Harry’s philosophy, then?”

“Nope.”

She turned to look at him in the firelight. “Are we friends?”

“I like to think we are.”

“I don’t know. I think Harry made a valid point.”

“Women and men can’t really be friends?”

“Exactly. The issue of sex is always there.”

Tuck looked into her eyes.

Tension permeated the room. Sexual tension. Taut and hot. Jillian glanced away and stared into the fireplace, focused on the
flames flicking the wood, the smell of mesquite.

But no matter how hard she tried to direct her attention elsewhere, every cell in her body was acutely aware of the man sitting
next to her. The sexy man she was stranded with in a snowbound cabin.

She fisted her hands against the tops of her thighs. Her throat felt tight, the set of her shoulders even tighter. Restlessly,
she wriggled her toes inside her thick woolen socks. Even way across the couch, Jillian could feel the heat emanating off
Tuck’s body. The room smelled of him—musky, manly, magnificent.

“Fear and stubborn pride kept Harry and Sally apart when they could have, should have, been together much sooner,” she said.

“Yeah,” he said. “Stupid Harry, stupid Sally.”

“Or,” she said, “I suppose you could look at it from the opposite angle. They let sex spoil a wonderful friendship.”

“You can’t have a great love relationship and a great friendship at the same time?” Tuck asked. Then before she could answer,
he said, “No, wait, you’re the woman who doesn’t believe in true love at all.”

“It’s not that I don’t believe in love,” Jillian said. “It’s just that I don’t believe it’s some magical, fairy-dust kind
of thing. Seriously, do you?”

“I used to. Once upon a time.”

“And now?”

“I’m not so naïve. I thought true love would save me from pain. What I found out is that it causes more pain than you can
possibly believe.”

“Yeah,” she said. “I suppose there is that.”

They looked into each other’s eyes, there in front of the flickering firelight.

“Come here,” he murmured.

“What?”

He reached out and ran his fingertips along her shoulder, and she moved closer to him, anxious to feel his breath on her neck,
to feel the beating of his heart beneath her palm.

She was someone new. Different. No longer a legal eagle from Houston. No longer that stepchild on the outside looking in.
No longer the dirty mistress, the judge’s ugly little secret standing on the doorstep on Christmas Eve dressed like a Victoria’s
Secret cowgirl.

Tuck just held her in the circle of his arms. Held her and looked straight into her. “You’ve never been valued the way you
deserve.”

“I’m no Magic Woman.”

“You are.”

“I’ve told you, I don’t believe in magic.”

“David Copperfield would be so disappointed.”

“He knows there’s no such thing as magic. He makes a living faking people out.”

“Why are you so afraid to believe?” Tuck asked.

Jillian wrinkled her nose. “I hate getting my hopes dashed.”

“There is something out there, Queenie.” He tightened his arms around her. “Something that can’t be explained. I saw it in
those learning centers I designed.” And apparently in the music box he’d designed for Evie. It felt good, knowing the magic
was back.

“Yeah, so why did you stop designing them?”

He drew in a deep breath. “You’ve got me there.”

They sat there for a long time, snuggled up on the couch together, listening to the wind howl and Mutt snore.

Tuck played with a lock of her hair. She had such beautiful hair. Silky and straight. He had so many questions to ask her.
They’d known each other almost two months, and he hadn’t asked her the truly important things about her past.

“Tell me,” he said. “Tell me about your pain. Tell me what makes it so hard for you to believe.”

“It’s a long sordid story,” she said. “I’m sure you don’t want to hear it.”

He waved a hand at the bank of snow pressing heavily against the window. “It’s not as if we’re going anywhere. What was your
childhood like? I’ve gotten the impression it wasn’t good.”

Jillian sighed, moved from the circle of his arms, and curled her legs underneath her. “I don’t even remember my mother, and
I barely remember my father.”

“They’re dead?”

“My father is. My mother …” She shrugged. “Who knows where she is?”

“You never tried to find out?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“She never wanted me.”

He waited, not pressing, letting her tell her life story at her own pace.

She stared into the fire, seemingly hypnotized. When she spoke again, it was almost to herself. “My parents hooked up when
they were quite young. My mother was eighteen, my father nineteen. From what I gleaned from my stepmother, they had a very
tumultuous relationship. Then again, her version of things tend to get pretty skewed.”

Tuck gave her his full attention.

Jillian pulled her knees to her chest and clasped her arms around her legs. The pensive look on her face told him she was
leafing through her memories. “My dad was married to my stepmother when he got my mom pregnant. My mother didn’t tell him
about me. But having a baby didn’t stop her from hanging out in bars and pool halls. She had an alcohol problem. I realize
that now. I remember falling asleep on shuffle-board tables to the sound of Hank Williams and Merle Haggard on the jukebox
and the smell of beer and cigarettes in the air. In the meantime, my dad had this whole other family I knew nothing about.
Two other daughters. Legitimate daughters.”

Tuck thought about his own stable, loving family. His parents who were still happily married after forty years. He’d been
so lucky and he knew it.

“Then on Christmas Eve, when I was three years old, my mother left me on my father’s porch with a letter of explanation pinned
to my chest, rang the doorbell, and just drove away.”

“Damn. That was cold-blooded.”

“I don’t remember that day, but I suppose in her mind she was doing the best thing for me.”

“You must have felt so scared and lonely that you blocked it out.” The thought of that three-year-old kid abandoned on a doorstep
on Christmas Eve fisted anger inside him. What kind of person would do such a thing?

She blew out her breath, and that’s all Tuck thought he was going to get out of her. He said nothing further. If she didn’t
want to talk about it, she didn’t want to talk about it.

But then a few minutes later, she surprised him by saying, “My stepmother was very unhappy to suddenly have a third daughter
to raise. I don’t think that marriage was a happy one. My stepmother wasn’t the most stable person emotionally, and my dad
threw himself into his work. He’d leave before I woke up in the mornings, and often he wouldn’t return until long after I
was in bed. Like I said, I was really little, and I don’t remember that much about him. The one clear memory I have of him
was this one time he took me fishing, and he bought me this little pink tackle box with yellow daisies on it. In a dumb way,
that was one of the reasons I was so excited about inheriting a lake house. So I could go fishing.”

The vision of a little black-haired girl clutching a pink tackle box with daisies and a kid-sized rod and reel caused something
inside him to unravel. “Aw, hell, Queenie.”

Jillian paused again and glanced over at him. The raw pain on her face was almost unbearable.

In that moment, he saw past her beauty, beyond the dark enigmatic eyes that were often hooded to hide her thoughts. Beyond
the high, feminine cheekbones, the thick black eyelashes, the regal nose. He saw beyond the promise of her beautiful mouth
and the chin she kept clenched so firmly, as if she feared it would give away too much of her heart if she relaxed her hold.

“My dad died in a car crash when I was five. His secretary was in the passenger seat. She died too. My stepmother claimed
they were having an affair.” She shrugged again. “Maybe they were.”

“What happened to you?”

“My stepmother raised me, but she treated me differently than her daughters. I suppose it’s understandable under the circumstances,
but a kid only knows she’s being singled out, punished more often. Not long after my father died, my half sister Kaitlin and
I were playing hair salon, and I whacked off Kaitlin’s hair. My stepmother had a fit. It was Christmastime, and that year
she put coal in my stocking. She told me I was a very bad girl and Santa didn’t love me. Later on, she mellowed, or the doctor
got her on the right medication, and she stopped being so mean, but those early years …” Jillian shook her head.

Quick anger pulsed through him that anyone could treat a child so cruelly. No wonder Jillian was locked up so tight and afraid
to trust. She’d been betrayed in so many ways; he couldn’t blame her.

“You’re kidding me.”

“I wish I were. One time when I was nine or ten, she just took off with her kids for the weekend and left me at home alone.
During the day I was fine. In fact, I liked having the house to myself, even though I was supposed to clean the entire place
while they were gone. But that night, a storm rolled in. I was in my bed upstairs, all alone. Not even a pet. My stepmother
hated animals. Refused to let us have any. So I finally fall asleep, and in the middle of the night, I wake up and I’m sure
I’ve heard a sound downstairs.”

“You must have been terrified.”

She nodded. “I lay there, not really knowing if I’d heard a sound or if it was something I dreamed. I held my breath, listening,
hyper-alert to every creak of the house. My blood was strumming through my ears. Did I hear a noise or was it my imagination?
But my mind was being so loud I couldn’t hear. I didn’t move, terrified that if someone was in the house, they’d hear me and
come after me.”