Loving Jessie (13 page)

Watching from the sidelines, Jessie found her eyes riveted to Matt’s tall figure. He stood just a few yards from her, his weight balanced a little forward, waiting for the snap. Without uniforms, they were playing shirts and skins. He’d stripped off his T-shirt, and her pulse hadn’t settled since. She’d seen him without a shirt before, but not since they’d become engaged and all that warm, male flesh had suddenly become hers to touch if she wanted to. Just the thought made her mouth go dry and her skin feel tight and sensitive. It was a little frightening. She’d spent twenty-nine years sleeping alone and not minding it at all. Well, not minding it much, anyway. And now, suddenly, she was thinking all sorts of things she shouldn’t be thinking. Not in broad daylight in a public park, anyway.

But it was hard to keep her thoughts in line when confronted by a little over six feet of warm muscles and tanned skin. A thick mat of dark curling hair covered his chest before tapering down to a narrow line that bisected the taut muscles of his belly and then disappeared beneath
the worn denim of his jeans. Much as she hated to agree with anything Pammie Sue said, he really was luscious.

Reilly took the snap and moved back from the line, his eyes searching beyond the mass of grunting bodies. Jessie wasn’t looking at him. Her eyes followed Matt, the fluid, effortless motion of his body as he ran downfield. He turned without breaking stride, looking over his shoulder for the ball that was suddenly there, falling perfectly into his hands. Five long strides and he’d crossed the goal line for the first touchdown of the game.

“They played in college, didn’t they?” Dana pitched her voice to be heard under the cheers from the crowd around the field.

“And high school.” Jessie watched Matt run back downfield. He was grinning, pleased with himself and oddly boyish in his delight. Sweat filmed the ropy muscles of his chest and arms. She bit her lip against the sudden urge to press her mouth to those muscles. She cleared her throat and looked away, half afraid the need could be read on her face. Time for a distraction. “My grandfather took me to see a couple of their games when they were at UCLA,” she told Dana. “I’m not a big sports fan, but they were amazing to watch. Everyone thought they’d go pro. I know a couple of teams were scouting them.”

“Why didn’t they?” Dana asked, watching the scramble on the field as the opposing team ran the ball.

“Reilly tore up his knee halfway through his senior year.” Jessie shrugged. “The pros wouldn’t take him with a damaged knee. Matt wasn’t interested without Reilly. All he really wanted to do was take pictures.”

Dana’s eyes found Reilly where he stood on the other side of the field, head tilted back as he drank from a water
bottle. “That must have been hard, to come so close to the dream and then lose it.”

Something in the other woman’s voice made Jessie look at her. For the first time it occurred to her that, for all her beauty and poise, Dana knew something about how it felt to see a dream slip away. No one remembered the third runner-up in the Miss America Pageant. What would it feel like to come so close to the ultimate prize and then fall short?

Jessie looked away, her teeth worrying at her lower lip. She wasn’t entirely comfortable with the possibility of a kinder, gentler Dana. It was easier, more comfortable, to hold on to the view of her as the classic ice princess. Had she really let her jealousy of Reilly cloud her perceptions that much? And if that was the case, what had changed?

Her eyes sought out Matt. He was standing next to Reilly on the other side of the field, and it occurred to her suddenly that as disturbing as she found the sight of Matt’s body, she’d barely noticed that Reilly was also shirtless, tanned and nicely muscled. Jessie frowned. Actually, she couldn’t ever remember feeling the same gut-level physical desire for Reilly that seemed to come over her whenever she looked at Matt lately. The thought made her uneasy. She’d been dreaming about Reilly since she was sixteen. She’d fantasized about their wedding, about cozy candlelight dinners, about long walks on a picturesque beach, holding hands while the tide rolled in. She’d never once felt the urge to run her tongue over his stomach and taste the salty tang of his sweat.

Oblivious to the people around her and the game in progress on the field, Jessie shifted uneasily. Maybe it was the knowledge that she and Matt were going to try
and make a baby together that sparked these unexpected feelings, some sort of primal female reaction.

It was comforting to think she could blame biology for all the strange new needs that were suddenly churning in the pit of her stomach.

M
att had never been much good at lying to himself. On occasion he’d envied people who had the ability to either ignore the truth or to paint it in shades prettier than reality, but it wasn’t a skill he’d ever developed. When Jessie had agreed to marry him, he hadn’t pretended that the situation was anything other than what it was. She loved him, but she wasn’t
in
love with him, and he could live with that. But she just might be in love with Reilly, and he couldn’t honestly say the idea didn’t bother him. Of course, maybe he’d misinterpreted the look he’d seen in her eyes the night of the party, but, if he hadn’t, then he was about to marry a woman who was in love with his best friend.

It sounded like the lyrics to a country song or a soap-opera plot. It sounded like a recipe for disaster, but he’d decided to take the risk. They could make this work. But he knew it wouldn’t work if he started looking for hidden meanings every time Jessie and Reilly were together. Jealousy would be not just stupid but a sure road to disaster. Which was why he didn’t mind at all that the two
of them had wandered down to the edge of the lake to feed crusts of bread to the ducks. They’d all been friends for years, so he barely noticed when Jessie took Reilly’s hand to let him help her down the sloping path to the water. And it didn’t bother him at all when she laughed at something Reilly said. He was perfectly comfortable with their friendship. Perfectly. Comfortable. He was just more comfortable looking at something else.

The day was almost over. It was still daylight, and the air was still warm, but the crowds had thinned out. Most of the families were gone, parents toting children grown cranky and tired with an excess of food and fun. He could hear the rhythmic slap of a basketball from the court on the other side of the playground, and someone had turned on their boom box, and now the sharp twang of Alan Jackson extolling the virtues of life way down yonder on the Chattahoochee drifted on the air. Volunteer cleanup crews were wandering over the grass, picking up stray paper cups and napkins, and dropping them into bright yellow trash bags.

He’d been right to come back here, Matt thought. This was where he needed to be. Maybe Dorothy had said it best:
There’s no place like home
. Good memories and bad, this was home. This was where he needed to be to make peace with the past and to build a future, no matter how unexpected that future was turning out to be.

“How’s your shoulder?” Dana’s question drew Matt’s eyes from the couple near the water. Not that he’d been watching them. He smiled as he turned to look at her. Wearing a pair of blue capri pants and a sleeveless white blouse, her pale blond hair caught back in a sleek French braid, a glass of pale wine in her hand, she looked like an advertisement for beautiful people at leisure.

“It’s okay.” She raised one brow in an elegant, doubt
ing arc, and he laughed. “It feels like somebody put their knee in it and bounced up and down a couple of times.”

Which was pretty much what had happened. Nothing like finding yourself at the bottom of a pile of hard bodies to remind you that you weren’t as young as you used to be, then having someone accidentally jab a knee into a gunshot wound just to drive the point home. It had also inspired him to take himself out of the game, which proved that he hadn’t completely lost his mind. A few hours later, his shoulder was throbbing dully, but he didn’t think there was any permanent damage, and a little pain seemed a small price to pay for recapturing a slice of a younger, simpler time.

“Do you have something to take for the pain?” Dana asked.

He widened his eyes. “What, and ruin my macho image?” She frowned, and he grinned. “I took a couple aspirin. That’s really all I need.” When she looked doubtful, he shook his head. “I’m okay, Dana. No permanent damage. Scout’s honor.”

“Were you a Boy Scout?” she asked suspiciously.

“No, but I dated a former Girl Scout once and she let me see her badges.” He waggled his eyebrows in an exaggerated leer.

It was the first time he’d heard her laugh out loud, and the rich, almost bawdy sound of it seemed at odds with the cool blond perfection of her beauty. It was an unexpected touch of humanity.

He was starting to see that there was a lot more to Dana McKinnon than just her astonishing face. Five years ago, at the wedding, he’d been left with little impression of the bride beyond her undeniable beauty. Though he liked to think he was above such stereotypes, he had to admit that he hadn’t looked beyond the beauty queen
packaging to see what else might have drawn Reilly to her. He’d gotten to know her a little better over the past few weeks, and he thought there really was a great deal more to Dana McKinnon than what met the eye.

Her gaze shifted to something behind him, and the sparkle faded as something almost lost came into her eyes. Turning, he saw Reilly and Jessie walking back up the slope from the lake. Reilly had hold of Jessie’s hand and was making a production out of pulling her up the path, while she laughed up at him. The late-afternoon sun slanted across her face, catching faint red highlights in her hair. If Dana was cool perfection, Jessie was all warmth and sunlight. Dana’s beauty could make a man catch his breath, but those flawless features also said “look but don’t touch.” Jessie made a man want to draw near, made him want to hold his hands out to warm himself on her smile.

“The three of you have been friends for a long time.” It wasn’t quite a question, but Matt answered as if it were.

“Most of our lives.”

Dana lifted her glass and swallowed the last of the wine. “I used to wonder why she and Reilly never got together.” She said it casually, as if she had little interest in his response. “They always seemed so well suited.”

“They’re friends,” Matt said, and hoped his smile didn’t look as tight as it felt. He didn’t particularly want to hear just how well suited Jessie and Reilly were.

“So are you and Jessie,” Dana pointed out. She slanted him a quick, unreadable look. “But here you are, in the midst of a whirlwind romance, getting married next week.”

Whirlwind romance?
Well, the whirlwind part of the description was accurate, Matt thought. He wasn’t sure
about the romance. Maybe. There was certainly something there that was a long way from friendship.

“Sometimes friendships change,” he said.

He looked at her and saw something uncertain in her eyes, a vulnerability that sat oddly on her cameo-perfect features. Jessie had said that Dana was cold, but he saw uncertainty and a hurt that went layers deep. Years long. He was willing to bet that it had taken more than Reilly’s brief foray into marital infidelity to put that look on her face, that fear in her eyes.

He wanted to tell her that Reilly was nuts about her, that he would never look at another woman—not Jessie, not anyone. But the words would ring hollow, because Reilly
had
looked. Looked, touched, tasted. That was the problem with breaking faith. You could never quite recover the trust.

He could have told her that it would never happen again, but it would be an empty reassurance. For one thing, she probably wouldn’t appreciate him knowing what had happened, and even if she could get past that, nothing he could say would serve to restore the faith Reilly had broken. Only time could do that. If it could be done at all.

Matt contented himself with giving her shoulder a quick, light squeeze that she could interpret any way she pleased. He moved forward as Jessie and Reilly reached their picnic area.

“Those must be the fattest ducks on the planet,” Jessie said, her face flushed and happy. “And the meanest.” She threw a teasing look over her shoulder. “Reilly thought we might have to run for our lives when we ran out of bread.”

He gave an exaggerated shudder. “You should have
seen the look on their faces. It was like something out of a Hitchcock movie.”

“Where’s Tippi Hedren when you need her?” Dana murmured.

“I think Reilly was hoping for something with a little more stopping power,” Jessie said, grinning. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone run that fast. Especially not when they were going backward and uphill at the same time.”

“Brat.” Reilly gave her ponytail a playful tug. “Have a little respect for your elders and betters.”

Matt reached and caught Jessie’s hand, pulling her forward and sliding his arm around her waist. It was pure coincidence that it moved her out of Reilly’s reach.

“Respect has to be earned,” he said, spreading his fingers over the curve of her hip. “It’s hard to respect a man who’s afraid of a bunch of ducks.”

“You didn’t see the look in their eyes,” Reilly muttered sullenly. “They were definitely out for blood.”

“These are a very rare breed of carnivorous duck,” Jessie said solemnly. “
Meateaterus quackus
. There used to be warning signs posted around the lake, but rumor has it the ducks ate the signs
and
the park employee who put them up.”

She tilted her head back to look up at Matt, her wide mouth curved with laughter, her brown eyes bright with mischief. His arm tightened around her, and he saw her eyes widen, surprise replacing laughter in the instant before his mouth covered hers in an openly possessive kiss.

He told himself it was just because she looked so inviting, that he couldn’t resist the urge to taste her smile. They were engaged, after all, and engaged people kissed each other. It was pretty much a rule. But that was only part of it. He wanted to believe that her feelings for Reilly
didn’t bother him, that all that mattered was that she was marrying him, planning to make a life with him. He did believe it. Mostly. Which didn’t explain why he felt this sudden need not just to kiss Jessie but to brand her as his. Or the surge of pure male satisfaction he felt when he sensed Reilly’s discomfort before the other man turned away.

Matt lifted his head slowly, and Jessie’s mouth clung to his for a sweet instant. Her lashes drifted up, revealing eyes that held a soft awareness and a shy hunger that made him wish they were alone.

Mine
. The thought slid through his mind, startling him. He’d never been the possessive type. Not with things and certainly not with people. He let his arm drop from Jessie’s waist and stepped back, shaken.

It was dangerous to want
anyone
that much. Especially someone whose heart might already be given elsewhere.

When Reilly suggested that it had been too nice a day to let it end so soon, no one argued. Though the sun was almost down, the day’s heat lingered. The calendar might say September, but summer was still in the air, warm and dry and inviting.

Millers Crossing was not exactly a hotbed of after-dark entertainment. Unless you wanted to eat out or go to a movie, the choices were pretty limited. Jim and Shirl’s Golf-o-Rama had opened in the mid-sixties, when miniature golf was the latest in family entertainment. It had survived a lengthy slump in the seventies and eighties, mainly because Jim and Shirl owned the lot and lived on the premises, which meant they could get by on a somewhat anorexic profit margin.

In the late eighties Shirl went to that great golf course in the sky. Within a year Jim was remarried, to a woman
half his age. They invested Shirl’s life-insurance money in the Golf-o-Rama, adding another miniature-golf course and a roomful of video games. There were gloomy predictions about the future of both the marriage and the business, but, more than ten years later, both were still thriving. Why the marriage succeeded was anyone’s guess, but when it came to the Golf-o-Rama, it certainly didn’t hurt that it was one of the few places in town that stayed open past six o’clock.

The four of them proved an oddly matched bunch on the course. Jessie played with more enthusiasm than skill, sending the ball ricocheting off the AstroTurf-covered barriers, sinking her ball more often than not with pure luck. Reilly played with methodical skill, analyzing each new challenge with as much care as if it were Pebble Beach and a title rested on the outcome. Matt blamed his abysmal showing on the fact that he’d spent too much time in parts of the world that were lacking civilized amenities like miniature golf. Dana turned out to have a natural flair for the game, judging her shots with cool precision. By the end of the game, she and Reilly were tied, Jessie had dropped her scorecard into a water hazard, and Matt was trying to convince everyone that the object of the game was really to get the
highest
score possible.

By then, lunch was far enough behind them that they devoured hot dogs and french fries in the noisy café, listening to the ping and roar of the video games in the room next door, while Matt and Reilly gave the afternoon’s football game a play-by-play analysis.

It had been a good day, Dana thought, lying in bed hours later. It had been a long time since she’d laughed so easily or talked so comfortably. An achingly long time since she and Reilly had held hands and walked together. It had felt good, even if it was just pretend. She squeezed
her eyes shut against the wish that they could just keep pretending. Maybe, if they pretended long enough, the pretense would become reality.

She lay facing the edge of the mattress and listened to Reilly getting ready for bed in the room behind her. She heard the muted clink as he emptied the coins in his pocket into a shallow wooden bowl on the dresser. There was a moment of silence, and she knew he was sorting the pennies out; then came the almost musical jangle as he dropped them in the five-gallon glass jar on the floor. He’d been depositing pennies in that jar since before they were married, and it was still less than half-full. He’d joked that, when it was full, they would cash the coins in and take a trip around the world, and she’d pointed out that, at the rate the jar was filling, they were more likely to need the money for matching dentures. He’d laughed and promised he would love her even without teeth.

The bed dipped as he sat down, and she heard the soft thuds as his running shoes hit the floor. He stood, and her mouth went dry at the quiet rasp of his zipper and then the rustle of denim sliding down his long legs. She knew without looking that he was standing on the other side of the bed wearing nothing but a pair of plain white briefs. He would stretch, his back arching a little; then he would run his fingers through his hair, tousling it into thick dark gold waves. Then he would slide the briefs off and walk naked into the bathroom to drop them in the hamper. If she rolled over, she could watch him walk away, watch the play of muscle in thigh and buttock, the long, smooth line of his back. She squeezed her eyes tightly shut and stayed where she was, barely breathing until she heard the bathroom door close behind him.