Making It Last - A Novella (Camelot Series) (6 page)

No
, he could say. The answer that would allow Clark, at least, to sleep.

No, what gave you that idea? Of course not. Never
.

But he tried not to make promises to his children that he couldn’t keep. He’d already promised Jake that Amber was coming home.

She was. He knew she would.

He just didn’t know if she would
stay
home.

You don’t get it
, Janet had said.

But he did. He
did
get it.

Ten years of marriage, thirteen years together, three boys who needed them every day, every night—and it all came down to this decision he had to make.

A decision that, now that he stared straight at it, wasn’t really a decision at all.

Janet was right. He was losing Amber. And faced with his worst fear, it didn’t matter what he did. It only mattered that he do something different, because none of the things he was doing now were working.

If the house was filling with water—if Amber was in it—well, it didn’t signify a thing how furiously he paced the deck, did it? It didn’t count for shit that he
believed
it when he told
his boys,
I’m doing everything I can. She’ll come back. I promise
.

He had to dive in the water.

If that meant he lost the house or had to give up the only part of his work he liked, so be it.

He’d built this house for her. He’d started Mazzara Homes in the first place because she’d encouraged him to do what he liked, to do work that meant something to him. If he lost her, he wasn’t going to give a shit about the house. He wasn’t sure he’d give a shit about anything.

“I’m going to bring her home,” he told his son.

It was the only answer Tony had.

She wasn’t picking up his calls. Jamila had given him the room number, but Amber wasn’t in the room. She wasn’t by the pool or in the lobby or along the resort’s stretch of beach.

She wasn’t in the restaurant.

Tony stood in the open-air bar, turning in a slow circle, reluctant to admit to himself that she wasn’t here, either.

This hadn’t been part of his plans, but his plans had more or less gone to shit, and they hadn’t been anything to boast about in the first place.

Fly to Jamaica. Find his wife. Fix things.

He’d spent the hours after Clark woke him sorting out tickets, reassuring his kids, asking his older sisters and Amber’s sister, Katie, to check in on the boys and keep their spirits up while he was away on this marriage rescue mission.

Then he’d had to drive to Columbus, twenty miles over the limit because he was late and he had to make the plane—only to get there and park and deal with the steady rise of his blood pressure all the way through security, a sweaty sprint to the gate, and the announcement that the flight had been delayed.

Two more delay announcements, a missed connection, a rebooking that got him to Montego Bay hours later than he’d planned.

His bag was getting heavy from hauling it all over the resort, and he still had no idea where to find Amber.

He hadn’t told her he was coming, because whenever he’d imagined putting his plan into words, it sounded too dramatic. Too
desperate
.

I’m flying to Jamaica
.

Why?

To bring you home
.

I’m coming home on Friday.

I know but …

But everything he’d thought of to say after that sounded stupid, even inside his own head.
It would sound worse out loud. He’d figured it would be better to just find her and take it from there.

He saw only a few scattered groups of people at the bar. A crowd at the back that had pushed together two small, round tables. All ages—maybe a family reunion or a wedding. Talking up a storm. Smiling a lot. None of them people Tony knew. None of them with long, dark hair and big brown eyes.

Over by the railing, a blond couple took in the ocean view. A single man was talking to the bartender. Another couple stood at the bar, a man in a sport coat smiling, leaning over a brunette with a short, choppy haircut and red spiky shoes and a black dress cut so low in the back, he could see the full length of her spine.

She had a birthmark like a hyphen on her shoulder blade.

Tony looked again.

Amber
.

Amber with her hair chopped off, wearing a dress and shoes he’d never seen, holding a drink.

Amber with some random guy’s face eight inches away from hers, their body language shouting
couple
so loudly, he could hear it all the way across the bar.

Tony’s hand reached out and gripped the top of the nearest chair.

His arm locked. Everything in him locked tight with rage.

For a minute, all he could do was stand there and watch and think, over and over again,
You knew this would happen. You knew it. You knew
. But even as he blamed himself, he felt nothing but fury—fury that he’d let this happen, and now he couldn’t move.

He watched, paralyzed. Waiting for it to get worse. For the man to touch his wife. To kiss his wife. Then Tony would kill him.

It didn’t happen.

The man kept leaning in, but Amber—was she tilting herself away from him, just a bit? Was Tony imagining how stiff her shoulders were?

The man said something and chuckled, but Amber didn’t laugh. Her smile was tight. Fake.

When he put his hand on her back, the smile vanished, and Amber took a step away from him.

She shook her head.

Not interested
.

When the guy walked away a few seconds later, all the breath whooshed out of Tony in one exhale, and he felt dizzy. The chair he was holding on to slid a few inches across the tiled floor, the screech of its movement inexplicably audible over the music being piped into the bar.

“The Limbo,” of all things.

How low could he go?

Chasing his wife to the Caribbean, crashing her solo vacation, and then assuming on the basis of a haircut and a new dress that she was having an affair?

Pretty fucking low.

Tony let go of the chair he’d been gripping, pulled it out, and sat. Amber hadn’t seen him yet. Maybe she’d turn around soon. Maybe she wouldn’t.

Either way, he needed to sit. To breathe.

He needed to figure out what was supposed to happen in the giant planning gap between “get to Amber” and “fly home with your marriage miraculously fixed.”

Tony sighed and rubbed at his temples. His hands were shaking.

He had no clue how to do this.

Their marriage was a system with no slack in it. They had work, they had three kids, they had ten or twenty minutes together in bed at night before they fell asleep. He didn’t know what was wrong with Amber—what was making her cry—and frankly he was afraid to find out. He’d been afraid to find out for a long time.

Because he was pretty sure that whatever it was, he couldn’t fix it.

He couldn’t work less—not and keep the house. He couldn’t take back the children he’d given her, he couldn’t hire a team of housekeepers and nannies to make her life easier.

He could tell her he loved her a hundred times, but she already knew that, and whether she believed it or didn’t—whether it mattered to her or not—what could he do? Nothing.

He could take her to bed and make love to her for two days straight, and that would be pretty fucking grand, but what would it change? Nothing.

They were stuck with the lives they’d made for themselves, and he wanted to keep her stuck if the alternative was to let her escape.

Which made it hard for him to think of any way to also help her out.

Amber picked up her drink and swirled it around. It was green. Foggy-looking. She took a sip. The lines at the edges of her mouth drew deeper. She didn’t like it, but she was trying not to let on.

She scanned the room and saw him.

For an instant, her cheeks bunched, her eyes widened—the delight in them so delicious, he began to smile back, to
grin
, because Christ, yes, she was going to smile at him, and that was a damn sight better than what he’d thought was going to happen a minute ago—but then she went sort of blank.

Like she hadn’t quite recognized him at first, but then when she really
placed
him, she remembered that she didn’t feel like smiling.

Tony lost his breath, the blow as effective as a roundhouse kick to the chest.

Amber averted her eyes. Looked down at her drink again.

She lifted it and knocked off the rest of it in four deep gulps, and he tried to get his head around the fact that this person—this eye-catching stranger at the bar—could be his wife.

And that she could decide not to smile at him.

When had this happened? When had she started taking parts of herself back, and why had he let her?

He didn’t know. It scared him how little he knew, now that he was here.

But he
wanted
to know her. He wanted to know who she’d dressed up for, what she felt, why she’d almost smiled at him and then changed her mind.

He wanted his wife back, and he wanted
this
woman. Whoever she was.

If she was a stranger, he could be one, too. He’d seen magazine articles that claimed women liked that—liked to pretend to be new and unknown, liked to be seduced all over again by the men they’d married.

The last guy had struck out with the gorgeous brunette at the bar.

Tony hoped like hell he could do better.

* * *

When she looked up, he was right there, leaning against the bar beside her. Big and broad, smelling like woodspice deodorant and Seventh Generation double-concentrated laundry
detergent.

Smelling like Tony.

“Hi,” he said.

“Hi.”

She was so glad to see him, her skin hurt. Her jaw ached with the pressure of not smiling at him, her fingers twitching to touch him.

Amber held herself in check.

He nodded at the empty glass on the bar. “Buy you another one?”

“Sure.”

Sure, he could buy her a drink. Because that made sense.

It made sense for Tony to be here. Why not? He’d probably dropped by on his way home from work.

No. It was only nine. Considering how badly things were going on the job and how long the commute to Chillicothe was, he wouldn’t be home from work yet.

Maybe this was his lunch break.

She’d forgotten to pack his lunch.

The thought produced a hysterical pressure at the back of her throat, and she clamped down on it, afraid to do anything more than breathe in, because she might break.

One tap would do it, she was so brittle. Iced over. Ever since she’d sat down in the chair at the salon and watched her hair drop to the floor in heavy, wet chunks.

She’d let herself be towed along in the wake of the spa receptionist’s enthusiasm. Brittany had booked the haircut, followed by waxing, massage, sugar scrub, and manicure. Amber had let herself be buffed. She’d felt the hot trickle of a tear at her temple when a stern aesthetician in a lab coat ripped all the hair off her labia, and the tears had kept coming, strangely warm. Inside, she’d felt like she was getting colder.

Last night, she’d eaten a four-course dinner alone and tried to convince herself she enjoyed it. Today, the beach. The pool. A drink, and then shopping. New dress. New shoes. A not-quite date at the bar with Jared from the pool at some not-quite-defined time after dinner, because she hadn’t felt like saying no when she could shrug and look at the horizon.

She hadn’t led him on, precisely. Hadn’t batted her eyelashes or laughed at his jokes. She’d only been present, and her presence didn’t give him the right to touch her. They’d had a
misunderstanding about that. About what he thought she owed him, just by existing in this dress. By having tits and an ass and wearing lipstick.

She was so weary of being touched.

She was so weary of everything, and she didn’t know what she’d thought her mini-makeover would accomplish, but it hadn’t. She’d stood naked in front of the mirror in the suite’s bathroom and stared at herself and felt … not nothing, precisely. An absence of pleasure. An absence of anticipation.

She hadn’t cared what happened with Jared until he’d put his hand on her back and some of the ice had started to crack.

Don’t
, she’d thought.
Don’t, or I’ll break
.

And then she’d seen Tony across the room. A hammer blow, delivering back to her all the blood beneath her skin. All the sweat, the joy, the
fear
. So much fear, she’d had to clamp down hard on the need to smile. She’d had to. Because when she saw him, she felt that kiss he’d given her—that last firm press of his mouth against hers before he got in the van and left the island—and she’d thought,
I was waiting for you to come back
.

She had been. Or she hadn’t.

Had she?

Amber had no idea. No grip on anything.

God, it was terrifying. Why not have a drink?

“What is it?” he asked.

“Absinthe.”

One eyebrow went up. “I’ve never had that before.”

“It’s interesting.”

Tony hailed the bartender and said, “Two more of those.”

After the drinks were in front of them, the tip pushed across the counter, he lifted his glass and said, “Cheers.”

Then he tried it, and his brow drew in, darkening his eyes. Casting a shadow over the planes of his face.

He hated it.

Was it terrible that she loved how much he hated it? She soaked up the barely disguised loathing in Tony’s expression, and she let herself acknowledge how dangerous his arrival was.

It
meant
something that he’d come back. His arrival was a declaration, and it gave her so much lift—such anticipatory excitement—that she wanted to crawl into a corner and hide.

You can’t fix this
, her fear whispered.
Neither of you knows how to fix this
.

But here he was.

Here he was, and he smelled like Tony, and he looked tired and a little rumpled and a whole lot good. So maybe he knew how. Maybe they
could
.

“That’s … different,” he said.