What the Heart Desires (Contemporary Erotic Romance) (17 page)

Kimberly laughed.  “Naturally,” she agreed.  Then she remembered just how out of the loop
Garrett was.  “Actually,” she said, “the pregnancy was a false alarm.”

“You don’t have a kid?”
Garrett inquired, surprised.

“No.  I…don’t have a boyfriend, either.”

“What happened to whatshisname?”

“He’s, um…still teaching at the university and expecting a baby with someone else, actually,” Kimberly said.  “It’s okay,” she added quickly when she saw the expression on
Garrett’s face.  “We ended things on relatively good terms.  I don’t keep in touch with Felix but from what I hear, he’s in a pretty good spot right now.”

“And you?”

“What about me?”

“Are you in a good spot?  I was worried when I got your texts last night.”

Kimberly’s forehead wrinkled in confusion as she pulled her phone out of her sweater pocket.  “I didn’t send you any texts,” she said, scrolling through her message history.  Then it dawned on her.  “Jane!” she hissed, simultaneously wanting to hug and smack her best friend.

“Jane?”

“She’s here visiting.  She must have gotten ahold of my phone last night and sent you the messages.  She’s…got this crazy idea in her head that she needs to play matchmaker or mediator or…something,” Kimberly said apologetically.  “I’m so sorry you came here under false pretenses.”

Garrett
gave one of his characteristic it’s-no-big-deal shrugs.  “No worries,” he said.  “I only had to catch the red-eye from Los Angeles.” 

Just then the buzzer rang again.
  “Want me to get that?” Garrett asked.  When he saw that Kimberly was too lost in thought for the question to even register, he simply walked to the door.

Kimberly
was too engrossed in her phone to even glance up.  She looked over the text messages from the previous night quickly.  Jane must have sent them while Kimberly was in the shower.  Jane had sent Garrett several rather cryptic messages, including ones that simply said, “I need to see you” and “can you come over tomorrow around noon?”

What baffled Kimberly was that
Garrett had obligingly caught the red eye from Los Angeles just to come have lunch with her.  That had to mean something, didn’t it?  She didn’t know.  Reading things into the things Garrett said and clearly had not worked for her in the past.  Maybe it was time to stop making assumptions and quit trying to read between the lines.

“You order
ed food?” Garrett asked, returning with a large packed picnic basket full of cold salads, fresh vegetables and deli meats. 

“I, uh…Jane did,” Kimberly admitted
apologetically.  “I think she’s trying to force us to have the world’s most awkward date or something.  Again, I’m so sorry about all of this, Garrett.”

“Actually,” he said, “I’m famished and the food looks delicious.  Mind if we dig in?”

~~~

“You seem different,” Kimberly commented.  She was seated at the kitchen table across from
Garrett.  He’d been voraciously eating his way through the basket of food.  She, on the other hand, had barely touched her plate.  Instead, she’d simply sat there and tried to study him without making it obvious she was staring.

“I quit drinking,” he replied through a mouthful of pasta salad. 

“Oh.  Why?”

He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth and raised his head to meet Kimberly’s gaze.  “Maybe you were right,” he said.  “Maybe I did have a problem.  I wouldn’t call mysel
f an alcoholic, but I did use drinking as a crutch to…numb loneliness, I suppose, and forget the past.”

“What made you stop?” Ki
mberly asked, half-expecting Garrett to say he’d met some amazing perfect knockout of a woman and now he’d never be lonely ever again. 

Instead, he simply replied, “You.”

“Me?” she repeated, not understanding.  “Why?  I asked you once about how much and how often you drank but I wasn’t trying to be judgmental.  What you choose to do is your business…”

“Yeah, I always thought that too.  But then with the whole pregnancy thing…I thought a lot about who I wanted to be if the kid was mine.  I thought about the sort of life I wanted to give it and what kind of example I wanted to set.  So,”
Garrett cleared his throat, “I decided to make a few changes.”

In that moment, Kimberly realized that
Garrett had been genuinely excited by the prospect of having a child with her. 

“I’m sorry things didn’t work out the way you hoped,” she said softly.

He waved his hand dismissively and then took a huge bite of a deli sandwich.  “No big deal,” he assured her through a mouthful of pickles and turkey.  “It turns out I get a lot more done in a day when I’m not hungover!”

“What…what other changes did you make?” Kimberly wanted to know.

“I decided I’d really had it with all the travel,” Garrett said.  “It was a fun lifestyle for a young single guy with no responsibilities, but if I was going to have a kid I figured things needed to change.  So I changed my role at work.  Now I travel five days out of the month instead of twenty.  Oh,” he added as an afterthought, “I also moved out of the hotel.”

“I know,” Kimberly blurted out before she could think better of it.

“You do?  How do you know that?”

Kimberly blushed furiously.  “I…tried to call you, once,” she confessed. 

“Why didn’t you call my cell?” he asked.  “I’ve still got the same number.”

She leaned against the table for support, suddenly feeling very frail and tired.  “I didn’t try to reach you as hard as I could have,” she whispered.  “I didn’t think you’d want to hear from me or even take my call, for that matter.  And even if you did, I didn’t know what to say to you.”

Garrett set down his sandwich, food forgotten.  “Why does this have to be so complicated?” he demanded, sounding annoyed but not with her.  “This is dumb.  One thing I’ve learned from my shitty childhood is you can’t live in the past.  Can’t we just start over and try to go back to the way things were, before all the awkwardness and tension?”

“I’d like that,” Kimberly said, unconvinced that what
Garrett was proposing was even plausible.  Surely it couldn’t be that easy, could it?

“I bought a house,”
Garrett said suddenly.

“You did?”  She couldn’t imagine him living in a house.  Who would bring him room service and clean up after him? 

“Sure did.  Why don’t you come over sometime and I’ll give you a tour?”

“Okay.  Where is it?” 

Now it was Garrett’s turn to look embarrassed.  For once in his life, he appeared flustered as he picked his sandwich back up and stared at it intently so he wouldn’t have to face Kimberly.  “You’ll think I’m such a creepy stalker,” he mumbled, “but my place is two blocks away.  I figured that, you know, if the kid was mine, I wanted to be nearby.” 

Before Kimberly could respond, there was a knock at the door.  “It’s just me!” Jane called before stepping inside.  “Are you decent?”

Kimberly glared at her friend.  The suggestive question wasn’t lost on her and presumably wasn’t lost on Garrett either.  “You’re in so much trouble,” she told Jane, only half-joking.

Jane flipped her hair nonchalantly and pranced through the kitchen.  “Hi
Garrett,” she trilled on her way past him.  “I’m going to make myself scarce.  I’ll be in the spare bedroom reading my book if anyone needs me.  Ta!”

~~~

Garrett ended up staying well into the evening.  The conversation was somewhat strained.  They talked about nothing.  They struggled to fill the silence.  Kimberly noticed he wasn’t as boisterous and entertaining as usual.  She wasn’t sure if it was because he’d stopped drinking or because he was uncomfortable being there.

The entire situation was
awkward.  When has there ever been anything pleasant about deafening silence?  Even so, Kimberly didn’t want Garrett to leave and he didn’t seem ready to go.  Even feeling awkward together was nicer than being apart.

When she was finally at an absolute loss for idle chitchat,
Kimberly put on a movie.  She and Garrett had never stayed in and watched a movie together.  Sure, they’d flipped on the TV after sex at the hotel sometimes, but that was different.  There was pay-per-view porn and room service there.

The movie-watching at Kimberly’s couldn’
t have been any more ordinary.  She kind of liked it.  Now, in a way, she knew what it was like to have a lazy evening in with Garrett.  With him, even that was exciting.

He still managed to make her heart beat a mile a minute, even when he was sitting there doing nothing but staring at a television screen.  She liked the way he slouched down on the couch and casually threw his arm over the back of it, his legs stretched out in front of him.  She liked the tiny hole in the knee of his jeans and the way his shirt was wrinkled as though he just didn’t care enough to iron it. 

She liked watching him during the funny parts of the movie.  The way he quietly chuckled was endearing.

Every so often, Kimberly caught
Garrett looking at her instead of the television screen.  Usually she saw it out of the corner of her eye and pretended to be oblivious, but one time their eyes met. 

It was like time stood still briefly and they were frozen there, in that moment.  During that time, Kimberly felt like she and
Garrett were connected on some deep, meaningful level.  It felt, she supposed, like they were connected at the soul.

Then he abruptly looked away, shattering the illusion.  Disappointment washed over her.

Part of Kimberly wanted to slide closer to Garrett and cuddle up with him there on the couch.  But she didn’t dare.  She had no idea how he’d react.  Even if he reacted favorably, she felt like initiating physical contact with him was akin to playing with fire. 

So she sat there at one end of the couch while
Garrett sat at the other, a large pillow separating them.  It felt like they were miles apart.

Kimberly couldn’t get over all the changes Garrett had made in preparation for becoming a father.  It made her sad for him that there was no baby.  She could only imagine how excited he must have been in the beginning only to be let down when he discovered the truth.

She also couldn’t get over the size of his house.

“It’s huge,” she marveled, leaning her head back to take everything in as Garrett walked her into the marble-floored grand foyer a week later. 

“I am pretty well endowed,”
Garrett agreed, bursting out into laughter as Kimberly shot him a dirty look.  It was nice to see that the jokester was still inside.  And it felt good to be standing beside him laughing. 

It almost felt like old times.

“I don’t mean to be rude but how…”

“…did I afford the place?”
Garrett asked.  “I wasn’t exactly honest with you about that, either.  It’s not a bad omission!” he said quickly as the expression on her face turned to disappointment.  “It’s just that a multi-millionaire can never tell who his true friends are, you know?  I like to be cautious when I first meet people – no offence.”

Kimberly blinked.  “You’re a multi-millionaire?”

“Yeah,” Garrett confirmed somewhat sheepishly.  “I’m a part owner in the record company, and it’s a damn successful company.  That’s the part I left out.” 

“Wow,” she whistled, taking in the artwork.  “I take it you hired an interior designer?”

Garrett laughed and gave her a playful smack on the bottom.  “Now Kimmy, that’s not very nice…but yes, I did hire someone to decorate.”

He hadn’t called her Kimmy in ages.  He hadn’t smacked her rear in ages, either.  She wasn’t sure how to react, but a bolt of white hot electricity immediately shot through her body.  She turned around and looked at him.  She could tell by the expression on his face that he felt it, too.

“So you said you’d give me a tour?” Kimberly reminded Garrett in an attempt to change the subject and diffuse some of the very obvious sexual tension that had built.

“Yeah, yeah,” he nodded, ushering her further into the massive, mansion-like home.  “Come with me.”

“What have you been up to now that you have all this free time on your hands?” Kimberly asked as they walked up the stairs to the top level.  Garrett was behind her.  She couldn’t help but wonder if he was staring at her ass as they walked.  She kind of hoped he was.

“Oh, I still work,”
Garrett assured her.  “I just do most of it from my home office.  As for other stuff…um, let’s see…  I tried to take up golfing but decided it’s the most boring old man sport on the face of the planet.  Plus I felt dorky wearing those dumb clothes.” 

Kimberly burst out laughing at the mental image.  “Yeah, I can’t see you as a golfer,” she agreed.  “What else have you been doing?”

“I have a woodworking shop out back,” Garrett said.  “I’ll show you when we get done up here.  Who knew I was into woodworking?” 

“That sounds like a cool hobby,” Kimberly asked.  Since she wasn’t really getting the answers she was looking for, she tried a different, more direct approach.  “What about dating?” she asked.