Built to Last (Harlequin Heartwarming) (16 page)

“Ah…daytime,” he decided. “You’d have reason to be nervous at night.”

“Ding!” she said triumphantly. “Wrong. Turns out, in the daytime I’d look around and think somebody else will do it. I don’t have to. But if I’m the only hope for this guy, I’m more likely to take a chance and offer help. See? Context. The interesting part is, people don’t always react the way we think they will, mostly because what we think is actually determined by what we’d
like
to believe, if that isn’t too convoluted.”

Ryan nodded at the book. “This could make you a cynic.”

“Yeah. It could.” She sipped her coffee meditatively.

The silence was comfortable, although he used it to figure out how to ask questions she might consider threatening. Finally, he just decided to go for broke.

Trying to sound casual, he asked, “After you get your master’s degree, do you think you’ll go back to California?”

Another sign of how far they’d come was the fact that she didn’t get prickly. “You know, when I came up here, I assumed I would. Now, I’m not so sure. Libraries are better funded in other places, for one thing. The
cap on tax increases in California puts such limitations on new programs and buying, it can be really frustrating. Also…” She hesitated, then shrugged. “I like it here. I even like living with Kathleen and Helen. I was thinking about it the other day. If things are still going well when I graduate, maybe I could stay on. Find a job locally. Both King County and the city of Seattle have great public libraries.”

He should be glad, not mad. But he was, and he knew why. He was agonizing over whether she might ever love him enough to marry him, and she was thinking how great her present living situation was. Had she ever, even once, considered a future with him?

Unclenching his jaw, he tried to sound mild. “I have plenty of room here, too.”

She went very still for what felt like half an hour but was probably only seconds. Then she drank her coffee in an obvious bid for more time, at last carefully setting down her mug.

“Is that a…proposal?”

“It would be if I thought you’d take me up on it. Really, I was just hoping you might start considering the idea.”

Still not looking at him, Jo said, “You know
how I feel about commitment, marriage, children.”

They sounded like two people discussing the idea of switching brands of laundry detergent: interested enough to talk about it, but with no emotional investment.

He didn’t change that. “I’ve had the impression you might be changing your mind.”

She was silent, her head bent, the curve of her neck graceful. Her hair was bundled up in a ponytail, exposing the vulnerable nape. When she finally answered, it was with a cry from the heart. “I don’t know if I can.”

Ryan shifted on the couch so that he sat right behind her and could reach out and massage her shoulders. Appearances had been deceptive: she was rigid beneath his hands.

“I’m doing it again, aren’t I? Pushing. We’ve only known each other a few months, and I’m demanding you ditch your lifelong conviction.”

Almost inaudibly, she whispered, “I want to.”

He kneaded taut muscles and felt them becoming pliable. “What can I do to help?”

She rotated one shoulder, leaning into his hand. “You’re doing it.”

His grunt held amusement. “Giving you a back rub?”

Jo leaned back to look at him upside down. A tremulous smile was paired with big brown eyes welling with tears. “Being irresistible.”

Momentarily, his fingers tightened. He forced himself to relax, saying lightly, “You’re going to blow up my ego like a hot air balloon.”

“You don’t have a big enough one now. You have no idea how unusual it is to find a man as handsome as you who seems oblivious to the fact. You’re smart, successful and sweet. What more could a woman want?”

“You tell me,” Ryan said quietly.

She closed her eyes, and he felt her muscles tense again. “The idea just…scares me. Maybe my parents did want to be married, maybe they loved each other. But look at all the other marriages! It seems like most fail.”

“Half. The other half of people who marry are happy.”

Her laugh was almost sad. “You’re a ‘half-full’ guy. I’m a ‘half-empty’ gal. Maybe that makes us incompatible.”

He smoothed her hair back from her face, loving the spring of it, the strength and sheen
and rich color. Loving just to touch
her.
“I don’t feel incompatible.”

“Neither do I,” she admitted.

“Then?”

“Being boyfriend and girlfriend isn’t the same as being husband and wife. Right now, we’re the spice in each other’s lives, not the oatmeal. What would it be like for our relationship to be predictable?”

Great, as far as he was concerned. He hated coming home to an empty house, hated wondering when he’d see Jo again, hated thinking of something to say to her and then having to phone instead of talk to her across the kitchen table.

“We see each other almost every day now,” Ryan reminded her. “Maybe this makes me boring, but I want to be able to count on you! What’s wrong with sharing the morning newspaper and the oatmeal?”

She pulled away from him, untangled her legs and stood, retreating several steps. Facing him, arms crossed protectively, Jo said tautly, “Nothing! Not the way you say it. But for most people, dullness sets in sooner or later.”

He leaned back. “Is that really what scares you?”

“Yes!” Jo paced another few steps away, then swung back. “No! I mean, that’s part of it. One thing I’ve always admired about Aunt Julia is her independence. She doesn’t have to consult anybody. If she wants to spend Christmas on Cook Island, she goes. She can be spontaneous!”

He was growing to hate Aunt Julia and her globe-trotting, glamorous lifestyle, which he suspected was largely myth. “Is going to a South Pacific island by yourself really that wonderful?”

Anxiety darkening her eyes, she deftly avoided the question. “Even together! We’d quit being spontaneous! I’d have school, then work, you’d have jobs lined up, the kids would come for vacation… What if we lose all the passion and any chance for adventure?”

Adventure.
Ryan mulled that.

He loved working on a banister in a turn-of-the-century house, his patience and skill stripping away the dark layers of the years to reveal the golden glow of fine wood. He loved tucking his kids in at night, pacing the sidelines at soccer games, running beside a bicycle and letting go the first time to a gasp of fear and then a crow of delight. He loved the sight of Jo Dubray sitting cross-legged at
his coffee table, or munching on a sandwich in his kitchen while sitting on the counter with her heels bumping the cabinet.

That was enough adventure for him.

For the first time, he weighed the idea that maybe they
were
incompatible.

Then he considered how she held herself completely closed while she waited. He thought about the three months he’d known her and the ways they’d enjoyed each other’s company.

The most adventure they’d ever had together was that French film. Or in-line skating around Green Lake—that had been scary the first time he’d trusted himself to put wheels on the bottoms of his shoes.

At his guess, the biggest adventure of Jo’s life was quitting her job and moving to Seattle to go to graduate school. She’d never mentioned scuba-diving in the Caribbean or climbing in the Andes.

Adventure
was another of those things Aunt Julia extolled and Jo bought into, a hazy dream like dining at the White House with a charismatic senator or walking down the red carpet in a designer dress on the arm of an Academy Award-nominated actor. They were somebody else’s dreams, not hers.

He had the feeling she was waking up from them, like a star gymnast who realized she’d starved herself, suffered shattered vertebrae, given up school and friends and boyfriends all for her parents and not herself.

Or maybe he was kidding himself.

“Adventure,” he said thoughtfully, “comes in a lot of forms. What do you have in mind?”

Her eyes narrowed. “You want me to list every adventurous thing I might
spontaneously—
” she became a little shrill on the one word “—choose to do over the next fifty years?”

“No,” he said patiently. “What I’m suggesting is that marriage is an adventure. So is having kids. Going to graduate school. Starting a new job. Or do you have more in mind the kind of thrills you might get from sky-diving or spelunking.” He frowned. “Is that how you say it?”

“You’re making fun of me,” she snapped.

“No, I’m not. I’m asking you how you want to live your life? Sky-diving? Touching other people’s lives without fully entering them? Or do you want to take some real risks?”

Pure panic glittered in her eyes now. “You’re misunderstanding every word I said!”

“How’s that?”

“I’m afraid of losing spontaneity. Of not having
fun
anymore, because we get ground down by daily life.”

He finally stood and went to her. When he reached out and ran his hands up and down her arms, she didn’t step away, but she didn’t lean into him, either.

“Daily life grinds whether you’re married or not. Seems to me you can resist it best by being happy, by having someone to talk to.”

Jo didn’t say anything or look above his chest.

“Why can’t we have fun together?”

She sneaked a glance upward. “Haven’t you noticed how we already do less exciting things? I study here, you bring dinner to my house.”

“I like having you here.”

Her gaze dropped again. “I like being here. But…”

He understood all that the “but” implied. Commitment meant the loss of self. Parenting was joyless. The only happy person she’d had to model herself on was the carefree Aunt Julia. Jo was terrified that she’d become like her father if she took on the obligations of family.

“Forget I asked you to move in,” Ryan said
recklessly. “How about if instead we plan a trip together? Let me prove we can have fun, throw off the shackles of daily life.”

She looked wary but interested. “A trip?”

“Someplace neither of us have ever been. Someplace romantic.”

“But…you have the kids over Christmas break,” Jo said doubtfully. “And I can’t miss school.”

He didn’t point out that she was
not
demonstrating the soul of an adventurer.

“Okay, we probably can’t go to Paris.” He thought. “When do you go back to school after Christmas break?”

“January seventh or eighth.” She frowned. “I’m not sure. Something like that.”

“All right. Melissa and Tyler fly home on the morning of the thirtieth. They start school on the second. So that gives us a week. New York City. We could take in Broadway shows, maybe ring in the new year in Times Square.”

She made a “maybe” face.

Then it came to him. “No. You know where I’ve always wanted to visit? New Orleans. I want to see alligators outside the zoo. I want to walk through plantation houses and slave quarters—did I ever tell you I’m a Civil War buff? Imagine the French Quarter, with lacy
wrought-iron balconies and narrow cobblestone streets and the haunting cry of a saxophone.”

Instead of rubbing her arms, he caressed her. “Then there’s Bourbon Street, where the party never ends.” He made his voice a low rumble. “What do you say, pretty lady?”

Her smile tried to stay in hiding, but it crinkled the corners of her mouth and softened her eyes. “Do you mean it?” she murmured, as her face tilted up to his.

“Yeah, I mean it.” He kissed her. Against her mouth, he whispered, “Are we on?”

This smile, he felt all the way to his toes.

“Mmm. I’ll take you up on your challenge, handsome. You show me adventure, I’ll concede we can have it together.”

T
HE BOX
from Jo’s father arrived via UPS the same day Ryan’s children were to fly in from Denver. Somebody in the house had set the parcel, perhaps twelve inches square and wrapped in brown paper, on the hall table. On her way out in response to Ryan’s honk, Jo was glancing toward the Christmas tree in the living room that they had all decorated together when she saw it.

“Oh!” She stopped dead, staring at the package. Conflicting emotions flooded her, tingling in the fingers she squeezed into fists, keeping her paralyzed even when Ryan leaned on the horn again.

She wanted to take the box upstairs and open it
right now,
find out what her father had sent, what memories this gift might restore.

But, in a weird way, she was also afraid to open it. Maybe he’d sent things that would have no meaning to her, because she didn’t remember her mother using them: a half-finished piece of needlework, or a cookbook.
Or what if photos didn’t trigger any memories at all? What if she would never know, never remember, her mother any better than she did now?

This was her best chance—and she was scared to take it.

“Why are you just standing there?” Emma asked from the stairs. “That’s Ryan’s truck out there, you know.” She craned her neck and peered out the narrow sidelight. “Another car’s behind him and can’t get by. He’s starting forward. Hey! He isn’t waiting for you!”

Jo tore her gaze from the package. “He’s probably just going around the block.”

“Why
are
you standing there?”

“I just noticed the package that must have come today, from my father.”

“Oh. Yeah. It was on the doorstep. I brought it in. I’m sorry, I forgot to tell you about it.” Emma crossed the entry hall and picked it up. “What’s in it?”

“I…don’t really know.” With shocking ferocity, Jo wanted to snatch it out of her hands.

“It’s kind of heavy.” Mouth pursed, Emma shook it experimentally. “Like it’s books or papers or something?” she said in disappointment.

“Photos and letters, maybe.” Unless…was
there any chance her mother had kept a journal? One in which she wrote about the birth of her daughter, the dreams she’d held for her?

Oblivious to her turmoil, Emma asked, “Do you want me to take it upstairs and put it in your room?”

Jo stole an agonized glance outside. Ryan’s truck hadn’t reappeared, but it would any moment. She
couldn’t
open the package now. He’d be hurt if she blew him off and didn’t go to the airport with him to pick up Melissa and Tyler.

“Sure,” she said, forcing a smile. “If you don’t mind.”

Emma shook her head. “Will you show me if your dad sent something cool?”

Jo nodded, caught a flash of red out of her peripheral vision and said, “I’ve got to go. Thanks, Emma. I’ll see you.” She grabbed a coat and fled out the front door just as he pulled up again between rows of parked cars.

“Didn’t you hear me?” he asked when she got in. “I had to go around the block.”

“I’m sorry.” Jo fastened her seat belt. “I was on my way out the door when I saw that a package had come from my father.”

He glanced at her sidelong as he maneu
vered around a double-parked car. “Did you open it?”

“No, I didn’t have time. Besides, I didn’t want to just peek,” she confessed. “You know?”

He reached out and squeezed her hand. “Yeah. Some things are meant to be savored.”

Or cried over,
Jo thought. She definitely wanted to be alone for this.

“Excited?” she asked, deliberately distracting him.

His grin flashed, as boyish as his son’s. “You can’t tell?”

“Oh, I kinda got the idea.” She looked ahead at busy traffic as they neared the freeway on-ramp. “I hope they don’t mind me being there.”

“They liked you. Melissa asked about you the last time we talked.”

“Really.” Jo tried to hide her extreme skepticism about his implication that his almost-teenage daughter was dying to see her. Melissa had probably been hoping her dad would say he wasn’t seeing that woman anymore.

“She wondered if you’d decided to keep that dream-catcher. Because if you did, she thought we should buy one for Emma
for Christmas.” His voice easily mimicked his daughter’s. “Because it’s, like, the
perfect
present for Emma.” He resumed normal tones. “She wished she’d thought of it.”

Surprised and moved, Jo said, “She did help me pick it out. Maybe it should be from the two of us.”

“I think she’d like that.” He was silent for a time, frowning ahead at a slowdown near the Mercer exit. “Wow,” he said suddenly. “Half of me is excited that they’re coming, and the rest of me is already in mourning because the visit is only for ten days and then I won’t see them for almost six months. This visitation thing is awful. Sometimes I think it might be easier on all of us if I just got out of their lives.”

Jo protested, “You know that isn’t true.”

“Isn’t it?” he asked savagely, hands wrapped so tightly around the steering wheel she expected the plastic to crack. “Yeah, maybe it’s good they know their father cares. But do you think they
want
to get on an airplane every couple of months and try to figure out how to accomplish a midair change of loyalties?”

“If I could have seen my mother, too,” Jo said with absolute certainty, “I would have
wanted to no matter what. Even if it was only for two weeks at a time.”

Ryan’s face changed. “Jo! I’m sorry. I’m whining, and there are plenty of people with worse problems than mine.”

She bit her lip. “Just…remember. Your kids
do
want both parents.”

His hand caught hers, squeezed and didn’t let go. “Yeah. Okay.”

They didn’t say much more during the drive to Sea-Tac, south of the city and Boeing Field. Jo felt guilty. She should have listened, not belittled his misery. But she also believed with all her heart that Melissa and Tyler needed him. All she had to do was remember Tyler’s unhappiness when he talked about the move and wishing he could live here in Seattle.

Melissa and Tyler’s flight was on time. An attendant walked the two kids out and smiled when she saw them rush to their dad’s outstretched arms.

They didn’t notice Jo, standing back, until they’d started talking excitedly about Christmas and the presents they’d brought and had he put up lights yet and decorated the tree and…

“Oh.” Tyler saw her. His grin didn’t falter. “Hi! I didn’t know you were coming.”

Jo smiled. “I was here to keep your dad from pacing a rut in the carpet while he waited.”

Behind her father’s back, Melissa rolled her eyes, but in a friendly way. “You should have seen Tyler! He kept whining, ‘When will we get there?’ until I thought I’d scream!”

“Yeah, well, they’re a matched pair,” Jo said, while Ryan listened to Tyler. “What a pretty sweater, Melissa.”

The eleven-year-old glanced down. The loosely woven, fluffy aqua sweater was paired with a tank top in the same color beneath it. “Oh. Thanks. Dad sent it for my birthday.”

“Really?” Jo exaggerated her surprise. “He can pick out clothes for a girl?”

Hostility flashed briefly. “Hasn’t he bought
you
anything yet?”

Jo didn’t let her smile waver. “Not clothes. I haven’t had a birthday since your dad and I met.”

“Oh.” Melissa looked down, her cheeks reddening. “Dad, um, actually always buys me cool stuff. Mom doesn’t think so. She likes—I don’t know—different things.”
She smoothed the sweater. “Since we were coming here, I thought…”

Loyalties, switched midair.
Jabbed by pity, Jo reached out and hugged Ryan’s daughter, letting her go before she could stiffen or pull away.

“That was a nice thought,” she said quietly, before turning to Ryan. “What say we go get the baggage?”

The kids continued to chatter while they waited for their suitcases to appear and then on the drive home about Christmas and the flight and how Mom wouldn’t let them open presents from her before they left.

Tyler’s excitement briefly dimmed. “Mom seemed really sad when she said goodbye. Didn’t she, ’Lissa?”

His sister frowned. “I guess. Maybe because we won’t be home for Christmas.”

“Having your parents be divorced stinks sometimes, doesn’t it?” Ryan asked. “I wish there was a way we could both have you at important times.”

They nodded, subdued for a mile or two. Then Tyler burst out, “
Did
you put the lights up yet, Dad? Huh? ’Cuz I could help if you didn’t.”

“Oh, like
you
could help,” his sister scoffed. “You couldn’t reach anything.”

Ryan grinned at Jo, who was laughing. Had she and Boyce bickered nonstop like this? Had
she
considered it her duty to squelch her little brother at every opportunity? Maybe sometime she’d ask him.

When she told him what was in the package from their father.

Remembering that it waited at home, she felt hot and cold. She wished she hadn’t promised to have dinner at Ryan’s, that she could go home, sit cross-legged on the bed in her room with the box in front of her and slowly peel back the flaps. At the very same time, she wished that she wasn’t going home tonight at all, or better yet that the box of her mother’s things was still a promise and not a reality waiting like a slow-ticking bomb in her room.

Why had so much had to change so fast? she wondered in sudden panic. Why couldn’t she have gone along the way she was, content to hate her father? Happy with the independent life she’d chosen?

How had she come, in a dizzying four months, to pitying both her father and—of all people!—Aunt Julia?

Could she possibly be considering
marriage?
Not just marriage, but one that would make her a stepmother, even if only for a month or two a year?

Jo made herself take slow, even breaths. She wasn’t married yet.
No need to freak.

A deep rumble of laughter snatched at her, like a lifeline tossed to a woman fallen overboard. She turned her head, seeing the lines of amusement that carved Ryan’s craggy face, the warmth in his gray eyes as he looked at his son, and her heart cramped.

Yes, she was thinking of marrying him. Scary as the thought was, she’d come to the point where she couldn’t imagine not doing it.

However petty it made her, she just wished he didn’t have children, that loving him wasn’t so
complicated.

L
OCKING THE FRONT DOOR
behind her and turning off the outdoor Christmas lights, Jo pretended she didn’t hear someone moving quietly in the kitchen. Helen or Kathleen. She didn’t want to talk to either, be offered a cup of herb tea, hear about their plans or even worries. Now that she was home, she felt as
if she were being tugged upstairs by a force stronger than her fears.

Open me,
the box whispered, for her ears alone.

She tiptoed to the stairs and made it halfway up before she saw movement below out of the corner of her eye. The deep auburn hair was unmistakable. It was Helen, who stopped, looked up with a face somehow distorted—and withdrew, surreptitiously, back into the kitchen.

Jo hesitated, her hand on the banister, until she understood that Helen had looked the way she did because she’d been crying. Her face had been blotchy and puffy.

Jo fought her longing to go on to her room and the magical, terrifying Pandora’s box that awaited her.

Then she turned and went back downstairs, letting her footsteps fall naturally.

Helen was just turning off the lights in the kitchen. “Oh!” she said with false surprise. “Jo. You’re home.”

Jo hovered in the doorway. “Are you all right?”

Quiet for a moment, Helen stayed back in the darkness. “Yes.” She sounded sad but calm. “I’m fine. Truly, Jo. Just…suffering one
of those little blips that widows do. I’m ready to go to bed.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes.” Head high, Helen came toward her, not trying in the light coming from the hall to hide the ravages left by tears.

Jo backed out of the doorway. “I was just going up to bed myself.”

“Did you lock?”

Jo nodded.

Helen passed her and started up the stairs, her back proudly straight. Following, Jo said, “Helen?”

Her housemate stopped at the top of the stairs without turning. “Yes?”

Before she could change her mind, Jo asked, “Do you ever regret having married Ben? Given how hard his illness was, and how sad you are now?”

Helen turned at last and looked at her, but blindly. Her face crumpled. “No.” She drew a ragged breath. “No. Never. Not for a single moment.” As tears wet her cheeks again, she seemed to focus on Jo with understanding and even compassion. “The joys are worth the sorrows, Jo. I promise. They are.”

Jo nodded jerkily, wishing she could be
lieve this grieving woman with her whole heart.

Helen went straight to the bathroom, then stopped in front of the door. “Do you mind?” she asked.

“No, go ahead. I’m going to…read for a while before I go to sleep anyway,” Jo lied.

She closed her door and turned, for a moment not seeing the parcel. Panic and fury swept her. What had Emma done with it? She’d wake her up! She’d…

There it was, neatly centered on her desk. Jo’s knees briefly buckled. How ridiculous, to get so emotional. If she’d had to wait until tomorrow, what difference would it make? She’d waited twenty years, hadn’t she?

She took scissors from her desk drawer and the package to her bed, switching on the reading lamp that sat beside it. Jo hesitated, then tugged her sweater over her head. Pajamas first. She might as well be comfortable.

In a sacky T-shirt and flannel pj bottoms, feet bare, she settled in the middle of the bed. With the scissors, Jo neatly slit the tape, set down the scissors and took a deep breath. Her hands were shaking, she noticed with distant wonder, as she lifted the cardboard flaps.

On the very top lay a bundle of photos secured with a rubber band. Breath shallow, Jo picked it up and found herself looking at her mother.

A very young mother. Rhonda Dubray looked no more than nineteen or twenty. She wore shorts, a halter top and sandals. Long dark hair, parted down the middle, was pulled into a ponytail. Arms outstretched, she was balanced precariously on one foot on a driftwood log on a beach. Her laughing face looked uncannily like the one Jo saw every morning in the bathroom mirror.