Summer Kisses (76 page)

“I do understand. You’ve gotten a lousy deal. You know what they say to do when life hands you a bushel of lemons.”

“Yeah.” He laughed without a hint of humor. “Suck one and pucker up. That way life can kick you in the ass while you’re bent over waiting for a kiss.”

“Nothing I say will make you feel better, will it?”

“Not likely. I told you the two things that could, and neither of them includes conversation.”

She peeked at him from under her lashes. “So, what’s the first thing? You just said it would get your face slapped.”

Mac tipped her chin up and stared into her eyes. “I know you’re not that naïve, Sweetheart. If you’d like a demonstration, I’d be happy to oblige you.”

“Come on.” She stood and pulled him to the door. “I’ll make you lunch. After you eat, you’ll feel better.”

He yanked his hand away and strode down the hall to the kitchen. “Don’t bother. I’m going out to paint. The weather report said it’s supposed to start pouring tomorrow and last for at least two days.”

“You won’t gain any weight if you skip meals.”

Mac stopped short at the back door. “Quit trying to mother me, Abby. I need a woman, not a nursemaid. You made it clear anything between us is out of the question. So unless you’ve changed your mind about providing that first thing I mentioned, just leave me the hell alone for a while.”

~*~

Late that afternoon, Matt looked down from the ladder at two toothless grins. How could a guy stay depressed around faces like that? “Hey, guys. Are you ready to get to work?”

“Yeah.” Tommy nodded. “But first I wanna give you what I made in school today.” From behind his back, he pulled a picture of Matt on the ladder painting the house.

A lump formed in Matt’s throat, strangling the long whistle he tried to release. “Wow, that’s a beauty. How about you help me hang this up by my bed?”

He followed the boys inside, and Tommy rooted through one of the kitchen drawers for tape. Abby pointed to the refrigerator. “You don’t need that. There are magnets on the side of the fridge.”

“I don’t want to put it there,” Matt said. “I want to hang it by my bed.”

She crossed her arms in feigned indignation. “Oh, I see. Don’t you think that’s rather selfish keeping it all to yourself?”

“Maybe so,” he mimicked in the same playful tit-for-tat tone. “But it’s my picture.”

“Yeah. It’s Mac’s picture,” Tommy parroted, his gaping smile extending from ear to ear.

Once Matt taped the drawing to the bedroom wall, the boys ran outside. He returned to the kitchen and stood beside Abby who was addressing envelopes. “Uh, Abby?”

She glanced up. “Did you hang your picture?”

“Yeah. I, uhh....I want to apologize for taking my frustration out on you earlier. I know you were only trying to help. I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay. I understand how tough it must be for you.”

No, she didn’t. She couldn’t know how hard it was for him to watch her address invitations in preparation to marry another man. She had no concept how he ached to hear his son finally call him Daddy. Nor could she fathom his pain when he thought about how much of Tommy’s childhood he’d been denied.

He plowed his fingers through his hair. “Look, you haven’t a clue of what I’m going through because there’s so much more involved than you can guess. So please, stop trying to empathize with me. Some good old-fashioned pity will suffice.”

~*~

At five-thirty, Matt cleaned up and strolled inside to the kitchen, inhaling deeply. “Is that what I think it is in the oven?”

“Only if you think it’s lasagna.” Abby chuckled.

He scooped her up and spun her in a circle in his arms. “Sweetheart, you found something else that could cheer me up.”

“I’ll thank you to put my fiancée down.” Robert stood outside the screen door, a dark scowl twisting his face.

Matt let Abby slide down his body and raised his hands in surrender. “Hey, I didn’t mean anything. I was just having a little fun.”

Rob opened the storm door and glared at him. “I don’t like your brand of fun. Keep your sleazy hands to yourself.”

Rather than get into it with him, Matt stomped off to take a shower. When he returned, Robert sat reading the newspaper in the living room like a monarch seated on his throne, while Abby set the table in the adjacent dining room. Matt pulled the milk carton from the fridge and called into the living room through the archway. “So, Webber, what would you like to drink with your meal?”

“I brought wine. It’s in a bag on the counter.”

Matt found the brown paper sack, opened the Merlot, and carried the bottle to the dining room with the tumblers he’d filled. He arched one eyebrow at Abby as she tucked a napkin under each fork. “Why are we eating in here? Isn’t the kitchen classy enough for the dentist?”

“It’s not that at all. You saw how crowded the kitchen table was last night after Peter showed up. Would you mind telling the boys to wash their hands?”

“Not at all.” He strode through the kitchen to the hallway and poked his head into Tommy’s bedroom. “Time to wash up for dinner, guys.” As Matt headed back toward the dining room, Abby slammed into him in the middle of the archway. He grabbed her shoulders to steady her and gently touched her bruised cheek. “It makes me sick, seeing what I did to you.”

Her face tensed, reminding him of Robert seated in the living room. The man stood and swaggered over to Matt. “Are you saying you gave her that bruise?” Rob turned his gaze on Abby. “Why’d you lie to me?”

“I didn’t. I just didn’t tell you the whole story because I knew you’d be upset.”

“You’d better believe I’m upset. What do you expect when I find out you’re covering for this jerk after he hits you?”

Matt’s palms itched to throttle Rob for even suggesting he’d intentionally hurt Abby. Instead, he gritted his teeth and kept quiet. She didn’t need him making things worse for her.

“It was an accident.”

“It better have been, or I’m going to beat the shit out of him—which I just might do anyway.”

Matt squared his shoulders. “In your dreams, Webber.”

Robert pulled himself up to his full height and scowled at him, his nostrils flaring. Abby jumped between them. “Both of you just stop all your macho posturing.”

Rob crossed his arms over his chest. “Then quit evading the truth. You said you banged your face in the middle of the night. What were you even doing near this deadbeat?”

“I don’t have to answer to you. I’m not your wife,
yet
. For your information, Mac had a nightmare and was hollering. When I went to wake him, he thrashed around and accidentally hit me with his elbow.”

“Oh.” Rob shrugged. “See, now that wasn’t so painful, was it?”

“Actually it was.”

“Very funny.” Rob curled his lip. “Why’d you need to dance around the truth? Or wasn’t that all that happened?”

Matt glared at him. “
No
, it wasn’t. I asked Abby to stay with me, and she turned me down flat. She’s undeniably yours, Webber. So quit your jealous whining.”

“And she’d better stay mine. Keep your hands off of her, or I’ll break them for you.”

“Oooh, I’m shaking.” Matt sputtered and rolled his eyes at Abby. “I’ve been beaten, whipped, starved, and burned, and this windbag thinks I’ll be intimidated by a
dentist
.”

Then again, the jerk did have an electric drill and a whole slew of sharp instruments.

Matt headed into the dining room and took a seat on the side of the table with two place settings. He smiled at Royce when he slipped into the chair beside him. Tommy stamped his foot. “No fair. I want to sit next to Mac.”

“Hey, be a good sport, Buddy. Royce was here first. If you sit across from me, we can make faces at each other.” Matt crossed his eyes at his son, sending him into a fit of giggles.

Robert spent half the meal talking about a patient’s abscess he’d treated that day and the rest of the time draining and refilling his wine goblet. An infected tooth wasn’t Matt’s idea of scintillating dinner conversation. He looked at the boys and asked softly, “So did you two do anything good in school?”

“Yeah.” His son bounced in his seat. “I got to go to my special class today.”

Special class? Abby had told him the school had pushed Tommy ahead a year. “What’d you do in your class?”

“Just stuff with numbers. Didja know when I add two numbers together it don’t matter what order I put ‘em in?”

The associative property seemed pretty advanced for a kid his age. But then Matt’s engineering background suggested he must have had an aptitude for the subject, too.

“Is that what you learned today?”

“Nah. We was borrowin’ and carryin’.”

His kid might be a whiz at math, but his grammar definitely needed help.

Rob persisted in boring them during dessert and stopped mid-sentence, frowning when he saw Tommy licking icing from his finger. “Tom, use your fork, or you can leave the table.”

Matt’s stomach clenched. The ring on Abby’s finger gave the pompous ass the right to correct Matt’s son, and there wasn’t a damn thing he could say about it. Especially since Abby actually seemed to welcome her fiancé’s sudden paternal interest.

Tommy’s mouth twisted with resentment, but he obediently picked up his fork while the dentist continued his endless dissertation on root canals.

At the conclusion of dinner, Robert switched on the television in the living room. Matt gently pushed Abby toward the archway. “The boys and I can clean up. Go entertain your fiancé. If I have to hear another word about periodontal disease, I’m gonna puke.”

He finished in the kitchen and sent the boys to shower and get ready for bed. When he was through reading them the library books they’d brought home from school, he poked his head into the living room.

Robert had passed out on the sofa and was snoring like a grizzly bear while Abby sat in the recliner, hand stitching the trouser cuffs on a suit she’d been hired to alter.

“Great company isn’t he?” Matt snorted. “Does he always drink that much?”

“No. I think that scene before dinner drove him to it.”

“I’m sorry. I forgot he was sitting behind me.”

In truth, he’d probably done her a favor. Robert’s snoring had to be better than another sermon on gingivitis.

“The boys want to kiss you goodnight.”

“They’re in bed already?” She folded the pants and draped them across the chair. “Thank you.”

“By the way, do you have a few sheets of paper? I’m drafting my résumé tonight.”

“There should be a ream of typing paper and a package of lined writing pads on the shelf in your closet,” she called over her shoulder. “Help yourself. There’s a portable typewriter in there, too, if you’d like to use it.”

Matt followed her down the hall to Tommy’s room and stood in the doorway while she tucked in the kids.

When she started to leave, Tommy grabbed her hand. “Mom, you didn’t sing to us.”

She glanced back at Matt, blushing. “Sorry, I forgot.” She took a deep breath. “
There are places I remember
....”

He grabbed the doorjamb to steady himself. For some reason, hearing her haunting voice sing
In My Life
made his chest boa-constrictor tight. No wonder that song had been on his mind for all these years. When she finished, he applauded softly. “You have a beautiful voice.”

“And that’s just in the bedroom. You should hear me in the shower.”

“Is that an invitation?”

Her cheeks turned as pink as if she’d washed her face in raspberry juice. “That didn’t come out the way I meant it.”

“Damn.” He snapped his fingers. “You can’t blame a guy for dreaming.”

~*~

At ten o’clock, Matt placed his completed résumé in the duffel bag on the floor of his closet and wandered out to the kitchen for another slice of cake.

Robert grabbed the doorknob, preparing to leave, and glared at the huge wedge of chocolate layer cake Matt slid onto a dessert plate. “Didn’t you eat enough for dinner?”

“Rob!” Abby gasped. “Don’t be rude.”

“He can’t help it.” Matt stabbed his fork into the fudge icing.

Robert swept Abby into his arms and kissed her more passionately than Matt suspected the jackass would’ve if he hadn’t had an audience. “Goodbye, Honey. I have to meet with my accountant tomorrow night to do my taxes, so I won’t have time to see you.”

“On Friday evening?”

“When you put it off until the second week in April, beggars can’t be choosers.”

He left without saying another word to Matt, and a few moments later, Lucy arrived, her face tear-streaked.

Abby wrapped her arms around her. “Luce, what’s wrong?”

She handed Abby a letter and sank into a kitchen chair, sobbing. Abby scanned it, her mouth hanging open. When she finished, she handed it to him to read.

Lucy,

That bastard’s threats were the last straw. Since Mr. Rogers thinks he can be a better father and husband, I’ll take his advice and split. He’s welcome to you. You can have the house. Don’t expect anything else from me.

Bill

Matt set his empty cake plate down and took Lucy’s hand. “I know this is my fault, but I’m not sorry. You’re better off without him.”

“I know.” Lucy buried her face in his shoulder. “I thought about what you said the other night. You were right. I couldn’t let him keep hurting Royce. At least, Bill left us the house—even if it does need a lot of work, and it’s mortgaged to the max.”

She made it sound as if the son of a bitch should be given a medal for his generosity. “Don’t worry.” Matt patted her back. “I’ll take care of whatever needs fixing.”

~*~

Mac carried Royce through the back door followed by Lucy. Abby really wanted to be there to support her friend, but at the moment, a man’s attention would probably do more for Lucy than anything Abby could say or do.

When Mac didn’t return right away, she went to bed and tossed and turned until she finally heard the back door close shortly after one. She slipped on her robe and opened her bedroom door. Mac strode down the hallway. “Hey, you look exhausted. You shouldn’t have waited up.”

“I was worried about Lucy. How is she?”