Still the One (27 page)

“Fine. Shaken up by the whole thing, but fine.” Annette watched him drape the napkin across his thigh. She’d always loved
Dave’s thighs, always loved the way they felt so firm and solid and masculine. It was probably her favorite body part on a
man. When Dave used to kneel over her when they were making love, his thighs used to…

“Katie said you’re going to stay at Zack’s when you’re discharged.”

Dave’s words pulled her back into the moment. She brushed back a strand of hair, hoping her face didn’t look as flushed as
it felt. “That isn’t decided yet. I don’t even know the man.”

“Living with him is a pretty good way to get to know him,” Harold commented.

“That might be the way young people do it today, but it’s not exactly my preferred arrangement,” Annette said.

Dave and Harold laughed.

“Besides, I’m afraid I’d just be in the way.” Annette took a sip of water.

“Well, I have a solution.” Dave folded his hands on the table. “You can stay with me.”

Was he crazy? “No.” She adamantly shook her head. “No way.”

“Why not? I have a one-story house, and all the rooms are handicap-accessible. It even has grips in the bathroom.”

“Oh, that’s right. You bought your house from Mamie Duncan,” Dorothy said. “She was wheelchair-bound after her stroke, and
her kids fixed the house so she could get around.”

Dave nodded. “It’s the perfect arrangement for you.”

Perfect, except for the fact that Dave would be there. Annette shook her head. “It’s kind of you to offer, but I can’t stay
with you.”

“Why not?”

“We’re not married anymore.”

“So? Katie’s not married to Zack.”

“I know,” Annette said. “And that bothers me.”

“You want her married to Zack?” Harold asked.

“No!” The word came out more vehemently than she’d intended. Iris Huckabee and Myrtle Mann at the next table looked over at
her. Annette lowered her voice. “I don’t want her seeing Zack at all, to tell you the truth, and it bothers me that she’s
staying with him.”

“Why?”

“He’s a—a poker dude.”

Dave’s lip curved in amusement. So did Harold’s.

“That’s what Gracie called him,” Annette said defensively.

Dorothy’s eyebrows knit together. “Gracie thinks he pokes her?”

The ladies at the next table leaned forward, dropping all pretense of not listening.

“No!” Annette whispered. “He’s a professional gambler.”

“Not anymore,” Dave said. “He owns a risk-management firm that counsels some of the largest companies in the world. He’s entirely
respectable.”

It figured that Dave would stick up for him. “There’s no such thing as a respectable gambler. Besides, I don’t think Paul
would have liked the idea of Katie staying with him.”

Dave leaned back in his chair. “Under the circumstances, I’m not so sure.”

Annette stared at him. “You can’t be serious! You know how people gossip in this town.”

“Well, they’re gossiping anyway.” Dave took a sip of his water. “They do have a child together.”

Annette’s chest tightened. “That was years before she met Paul.”

“Yeah, but it’s still grist for the gossip mill.”

“Well, living with him will just make it worse. Everyone will think that something is going on between them.”

“What if something is?”

Annette’s heart squeezed. She rubbed her temples. “Do you think it is?”

“Well, I wouldn’t blame her. He’s a toastie, that’s for sure,” Dorothy said.

Annette looked at her blankly.

“I think she means hottie,” Harold said.

Great. A hottie. Just the kind of man she wanted her daughter-in-law living with.

“Katie and Zack’s relationship really isn’t any of our business,” Dave said gently.

Annette’s brow knit. “Do you think they’re having one?”

“I think we should stay out of it, and I think you’d be a lot more comfortable staying with me.”

Comfortable? How did he figure that? Annette opened her mouth to protest.

Dave held up his hand. “Don’t give me an answer right now. Take your time and think it over. You’d have a private bedroom
and bathroom, and I’d be happy to drive you to and from physical therapy. Katie’s likely to need help with that, anyway. She’s
going to be busy rebuilding her house and seeing to Gracie.”

It was true. Neither Gracie nor the storm damage to her house had been in the scheme of things when she’d made plans to stay
with Katie during rehab.

She didn’t have a lot of options. She couldn’t go back to her own home in New Orleans; it had been raised twelve feet off
the ground after Hurricane Katrina and now had a twenty-four-step porch, and she wasn’t supposed to climb stairs on her own.
Her insurance wouldn’t pay for her to stay at Sunnyside after the end of the week, and the rates in the rehabilitation wing
were too expensive for her to cover on her own.

“I’d welcome the opportunity to help you, Annette.” Dave’s eyes were warm, his voice earnest. “God knows I owe you. It would
be a small way of making amends.” He put his hand over hers. The warmth of his palm sent a shock wave through her, right through
her skin, straight into her bloodstream. “Promise me you’ll think about it.”

“Okay.” She nodded. “I’ll think about it.”

In fact, until she made a decision, she was unlikely to think about anything else.

“So here’s your room.” Zack opened the door to a bedroom at the end of the hall with two dormer windows overlooking the backyard.

Katie followed him inside, carrying the urn. “Oh, this is lovely!” The room was decorated in white and spring green with splashes
of coral, in a mix of gingham and floral fabrics.

“The interior designer intended for this to be Gracie’s room, but Gracie said it looked too girly.” He leaned against the
doorframe and watched her as she set the urn on the dresser.

She fingered a green gingham pillow. “Well, her loss is my gain. I love it.” She ran her hand over the top of a white vanity
with a a tufted floral stool. “This is the sort of room I dreamed about having when I was a girl.”

He nodded. “I remember you showing me a room with green checks and flowers in a magazine.”

She stared at him. She’d found the photo in an issue of
Redbook
that a bait shop customer had left behind. She used to lie on the saggy mattress on the built-in bunk of her mother’s trailer,
put a transistor radio under her pillow to drown out the sound of her mother with men in the next bedroom, and pretend that
she was in the room in the photo. “You remembered that?”

He nodded. “I remember a lot about you.”

She gave him a dry smile. “I’m sure I was at the top of your mind when you were dating Cameron Diaz.”

“Actually, I googled you when I was dating her.”

She hated the way the news pleased her. She gazed out the window as a distant bolt of lightning streaked across the sky. A
string of thunderstorms was rolling through southern Louisiana, and it looked like another one was on its way. “Really? Why?”

He lifted his shoulders. “She reminded me of you.”

Cameron Diaz had reminded him of
her
? Pleasure curled through her like a warm toddy.

“So what did your Google search turn up?”

“You and your husband had bought a house.” He picked up a vase on the dresser and looked at it. “It made me kinda sad.”

“I should have thought you’d be happy for me.”

“I thought that, too. That I should be glad you’d gotten what you wanted.” He looked at her, and his voice dropped. “I wasn’t.”

Her chest suddenly hurt, as if her heart was having to work too hard. “Why not? You had what you wanted, too.”

“Yeah, but it wasn’t what I thought it would be.”

The ache in her chest grew stronger. Zack turned the vase upside down and looked at the bottom. “Was your marriage?”

She tried to remember what, exactly, she’d thought marriage would be like when she was a girl. “Yeah. In a lot of ways, it
was even better. Maybe not in the candlelight-every-night way, but in a real, we-can-have-fun-even-though-we’re-just-doing-laundry
way. We—”

The door down the hall banged open, startling Katie. She heard footsteps in the hallway, then Gracie appeared in the doorway.

“Hey.” She looked from Katie to Zack. “What’s going on?”

“Nothing,” Katie said, feeling oddly guilty.

“Just showing Katie her room,” Zack said.

Gracie made a face. “I told you it was lame.”

“I think it’s beautiful.” Katie smiled at Zack. She couldn’t believe he’d remembered that magazine picture. If she wasn’t
careful, she might just begin to think that he’d really cared about her, that their time together had meant something, that
he’d felt that gut-deep connection, that he felt it still. And if she allowed herself to think that, she might begin to hope
for something more.

And she didn’t want more. She twisted her wedding ring. She didn’t want to open her heart again. She’d already had more than
most people ever got. She wanted to just be content with what she’d had.

So why wasn’t she?

“What was it like when that tree fell on the house?” Gracie sauntered into the room and sat down on the bed beside Katie.

A bolt of joy struck Katie’s heart. It was the first time Gracie had made any kind of move to seek out her company. Maybe
Gracie was starting to thaw.

“It happened so fast, I didn’t have time to think. I heard this deafening crash and felt the floor shake, and then the electricity
went out, and since I was in the closet, it was dark. I opened the door, and half the bedroom wasn’t there, and I smelled
smoke. I think I kinda went into shock, because the next thing I knew, you all were there.”

“Good thing, huh?”

“Absolutely.” She smiled at the girl. “Did your photos get wet?”

“No. Just the outside of the album.”

“Good.”

Gracie gestured to the urn on the dresser. “Looks like your husband made it out okay.”

“Yeah,” Katie said. Funny how she and Gracie were bonding over the things they’d saved from the house. Paul and Gracie’s parents
were bringing them together.

Across the room, Zack’s jaw tightened and his lips pressed hard together.

“Do we have any chocolate?” Gracie asked. “I’ve got a really strong craving.”

“Lulu brought over a chocolate cream pie. Let’s go see if it’s as good as it looks.”

Gracie popped up from the bed, and Katie followed her down the stairs. Zack took his time following behind.

“Want some pie?” Gracie asked him when he finally arrived in the kitchen.

“No, thanks. I think I’ll turn in.” He headed for the kitchen door.

“Where are you going?” Gracie asked.

“I’m going to sleep in the garage apartment.”

“Why?”

Zack cut a quick glance at Katie, then rubbed his jaw. “Well, Annette will be moving into the downstairs bedroom.”

“Not tonight.”

Zack shrugged. “Might as well go ahead and get used to it.” Without looking at Katie, he walked out the door.

The morning after the storm, the world seemed wiped with Windex. The air smelled fresh, the grass was a perkier shade of green,
and the sky was a dazzling azure. The beauty of the day was a stark contrast to the wreckage of Katie’s house.

Katie surveyed the damage, her chest tight, as she climbed out of the U-Haul Zack had rented in Hammond earlier in the morning.
“Good heavens,” she breathed. The trunk of a pine tree stood like a giant scorched matchstick, the victim of a lightning strike.
The top half of the seventy-five-foot-tall pine had fallen on the enormous water oak in her backyard, knocking it over. The
oak lay through the center of the house, its branches an incongruous fresh green, its root-ball twice as tall as Katie.

“It’s even worse than I thought,” Katie said.

“Well, let’s see what we can salvage,” Zack said.

Instead of wading through the debris, they went to the kitchen door, which was, ironically, locked. Katie’s hand shook as
she inserted the key. “My insurance agent said the kitchen was a total loss.”

She pushed the door open and gasped. It was beyond a loss; it was gone. Sunshine streamed onto the floor, which was covered
with splintered beams, crumbled drywall, and broken furniture. The back and side walls lay flattened beneath the trunk of
the enormous tree.

Katie tried to draw a deep breath, but her rib cage seemed to have shrunk. She bent and picked up part of a photo from under
the tree. It was one of her favorites—a picture of her and Paul on their wedding day, the one where he was feeding her a piece
of cake. The picture had been cut by the broken glass of the frame, and what was left was wet and warped.

Tears formed in her eyes. “All the pictures on this wall…” Her voice choked. The pictures were now under the trunk of the
tree. All the mementos of her life with Paul—their vacations, their holidays, their wedding—were gone.

Zack put his arm around her and pulled her close. “Hey—I’m sorry.” She smelled his shaving cream on his neck. His chest was
hard and firm, and she could feel the bulge of his biceps as his arm curled around her. She knew he meant to comfort her,
but being consoled by Zack right now made her feel disloyal to Paul.