by Abby Gaines
“Very good,” Garrett said admiringly, sending a flutter of warmth through her.
She kept her face immobile. “I have no idea what you mean.”
“I wonder who’ll be the next person through that door,” he mused. “Probably Papa Tony.”
“No!” Rachel said, dismayed. Tony would hardly trust her ability to coach Garrett if he came in and found them holding hands.
To her surprise, his face softened a fraction. “Will you let go if I agree to at least pay lip service to the idea of being nice to the junior staff?”
“You mean…you’ll pretend to care?” she asked.
“You say pretend, I say fake it,” he said lightly.
It was a silly offer, a nonoffer. But something about holding Garrett’s hand gave the words lip service a whole new meaning. Rachel found her eyes drawn to his mouth, her brain following swiftly behind. Making it impossible for her to explain that lip service was not an acceptable alternative to genuine respect for his team.
Though it was a thousand percent better than what he was doing now.
Garrett caught the direction of her gaze…and for the first time since he’d started work at KBC, she felt the full effect of his smile, the real thing.
There was a sudden absence of air.
Rachel concentrated on not gasping. This is The Shark. Don’t show weakness. “I suppose…what you said…would be a start,” she said.
Garrett released her hand. The sudden lack of contact left her chilled, her fingers tingling. Rachel rubbed them against her skirt as he strode out of the room without looking back. As if he’d already forgotten they’d held hands for ten minutes.
Doesn’t matter. Garrett had agreed to try harder with his team. Or to pretend to try harder.
I won, Rachel told herself. She ignored the little voice that asked, Are you sure about that? Ignored the prickling in her fingers that wouldn’t let her forget she’d been holding hands with The Shark.
* * *
THE SHORT, ASSERTIVE BUZZ of the doorbell at six o’clock on Wednesday evening told Stephanie the identity of her visitor. Her pulse jumped. She hadn’t expected him so soon—was this a good sign?
She pressed the button that would let her guest into Garrett’s building, then waited for the firm rap on the door of the condo. Please, she prayed, as she went to open it.
“Did you even look through the peephole?” Dwight demanded.
He knew she hadn’t; he would have been watching. Stephanie didn’t answer, just stepped aside to let him in. His service khakis, his daily office attire, suggested he’d come straight from work.
“And you buzzed me up without asking who I was.” He was rigid with anger, far too much anger over such a trivial thing. “I could have been a serial killer.”
“I knew it was you. I recognized your touch on the buzzer.”
He stared at her as if she was crazy. Then he turned his head away, focusing on a blank stretch of wall. Garrett really needed to decorate.
“I can’t believe you came here,” he said.
Stephanie had texted him her whereabouts on Monday night so he wouldn’t worry. And so he would know where to find her. She hadn’t expected him to pursue her so soon. He was more the type to let her cool her heels.
“I wasn’t sure Garrett would let me stay,” she admitted.
Dwight snorted. “He’d do anything to annoy me.”
She didn’t doubt that was part of Garrett’s rationale, but she believed there was also something less bitter, some buried seam of tenderness inside her stepson. She was counting on uncovering it. “It was kind of him. I’d have been forced to find a hotel otherwise.”
“You have a perfectly good home in New London,” Dwight said. “You have. Me.”
The hesitation jolted her. For half a second, he’d sounded vulnerable.
“I can’t come back until things change, Dwight,” she said.
“I still don’t understand why you left. Your note made no sense.”
If he hadn’t understood what she’d been trying to tell him the past few months, it was unlikely he’d suddenly get it now. Maybe if she’d said it a few years ago…but it wasn’t until she’d had some bleeding in her first trimester, and the doctor had told them to abstain from intercourse for a couple of months, that she’d realized their excellent sex life had been masking other problems. That every other aspect of their marriage was unsatisfactory.
She’d always known Dwight could be too commanding; it was a by-product of his job. But his desire for her had always balanced the power between them. With sex off the table, she’d discovered how uncompromising he could be, how little he was prepared to give emotionally. The warrior in him, without the moderating influence of the lover, demanded total surrender.
“I don’t want this baby to feel as if doing things your way is the only way to be good enough for you. To never know your unconditional love.” She perched on an armchair. “I don’t want our child to leave us and never speak to us, like Garrett. Though I’m not blaming you for all of that,” she said quickly. She did blame Dwight for most of it. But Garrett was far from perfect—too stubborn, like his father—and Stephanie herself had made some mistakes in those early years.
“I’ve told you I’m willing to. Do things differently,” he said. “I meant that.”
“But I don’t believe you can,” she said. “Unless you want to change with your own heart, not just because I want you to, it won’t happen.”
“This mumbo jumbo psychobabble is meaningless,” he said. “Stephanie, you’re pregnant and it’s playing havoc with your brain. The car’s downstairs—collect your things, I’m taking you home.”
It was an order from the Admiral.
Funny how she’d got used to obeying him without realizing that was what she was doing. He was sixteen years older than she was, and when they’d married, she’d assumed he knew best about most things. They’d become entrenched in this pattern, where he gave orders and she followed them. Stephanie swallowed. “No.”
Dwight reddened. “If you expect me to wait while you get over this tantrum, you’ll be waiting a long time.”
He’d always described Garrett’s behavior as a “tantrum,” too. Who knew Stephanie would share this bond with her difficult stepson?
“Did you ever love me?” she asked, then clapped a hand over her mouth. She shouldn’t have asked. Because if the answer was no, he wouldn’t lie.
He turned almost purple. “Of course I did. I do. And I’ll love our baby.”
She let out a breath of relief. He meant it…as far as he could mean it. Which was better than nothing. But he didn’t know the love she meant. The kind of consuming love that would make you go against all good sense and do anything to be with that person. As she had, marrying a man so much older than her, a man fresh from the loss of his first wife. His character had been stamped on his rugged face. She’d known he would be faithful. He would protect her with his life. Powerful factors in themselves. But even more than that, she’d been giddy with the excitement of having this strong, honorable man wanting her so much he’d trembled in her arms.
Yet when he’d proposed, she’d hesitated. And he’d said, “I won’t ask you again.” She’d loved him too much to let him get away.
“I love you, too,” she said. “More than you know. But having this baby has made me realize I can’t live with you. Not the way we’ve always been.” She paused. “Dwight, I need to be able to do things my way without being afraid of losing your love.”
“This is ridiculous,” he muttered. “You have medical appointments…did you think about that?”
“I can get to my doctor more easily from here than from home.” She’d chosen an obstetrician on the Upper East Side in order to be close to Dwight’s office, if he wanted to attend appointments with her. But he was too old-school for that—his halfhearted agreement to attend was nearly always superseded by some important meeting.
“We have the admiralty dinner in Annapol
is this weekend,” he reminded her. “I expect my wife to accompany me.”
She’d forgotten about the event that was the highlight of Dwight’s year. Momentarily, she wavered. “You can go without me.”
“And what do I tell people?” he demanded.
So this was why he’d come running so fast. Not because he missed her desperately. Although she knew Dwight was too self-contained, too disciplined for desperation, it stung.
“Tell them…tell them Garrett needed me so I stayed in New York with him,” she said.
“But that’s not true.” He was the most honest man she knew. If their marriage wasn’t working, it wasn’t because Dwight had pretended to be anything other than he was. It was because she’d refused to face their differences.
She thought about Garrett and the walls he’d built around himself. “Maybe it is true.”
Dwight snorted, suddenly sounding very much like his son. “He’s been spinning stories to turn you against me. He was always much closer to his mother. Too close, it seems.”
Stephanie couldn’t help smiling. She couldn’t think of anyone less of a mommy’s boy than Garrett.
“Don’t take his side against me,” Dwight roared.
Her smile vanished. “You need to leave. That yelling isn’t good for the baby.”
As if to bear her out, the baby kicked hard. The sensation still felt entirely miraculous to Stephanie. She broke off, to caress her stomach.
“Is it kicking?” Dwight’s hand twitched at his side; one thing he was good at was sharing the joy of a kicking baby. In that scrupulously fair way of his, he never assigned the baby a gender. Stephanie alternated between being certain it was another adorable boy, and thinking of an angelic little girl.
“Just go, Dwight,” she said. She didn’t want to soften toward him, and if she let him feel the baby move…
“I won’t ask you again,” he said, and she shivered at the echo of the day he’d proposed to her. I should have turned him down.
“Come home with me now,” he said.
Like all those years ago, she wasn’t able to say no. But she did manage to shake her head in refusal.
Dwight’s still-flushed face paled. His hand lifted in a jerky movement, as if he might salute her. He let it drop.
Then he left.
CHAPTER NINE
STEPHANIE HAD BEEN occupying his spare room for three nights and Garrett was ready for her to go. He could tolerate her forced cheerfulness and the clutter of herbal tea bags and vitamin pills on his kitchen counter. But she used the bathroom every ten minutes during the night, and while he’d never considered himself a particularly light sleeper, he was used to living alone. He hadn’t had a decent night’s sleep since she arrived.
When he got up at six on Thursday, she was already in the kitchen, making herself a pastrami sandwich. A strange choice for breakfast. Must be a pregnancy thing.
Garrett poured milk over some granola and ate standing at the counter, wishing he’d had more sleep. Last night had been even worse than the ones before. Not only had he had Stephanie’s disturbances to contend with, he’d been oddly alert, thinking about holding hands with Rachel. More than alert…turned on.
Too much going on. My brain is melting.
“You have that college visit today, right?” Stephanie asked.
He grunted. He didn’t like talking early in the morning.
“It’s a beautiful day. It’ll be nice to get out of the city,” she said wistfully.
“You could always go home,” he suggested.
She didn’t say a word, but the knife she was using to slice a tomato clattered against the board.
“Forget it,” he muttered. It wasn’t like he needed to sleep or anything. On the other hand… “How are you going on finding somewhere else to stay?”
“I’m working on it,” she said evasively.
That didn’t sound good.
“I’ll bet Dad’s missing you,” Garrett tried. But he couldn’t make it sound convincing and her eye roll said it wasn’t worth trying.
“He told me you’re hoping to make partner in your firm,” she said.
“Did he tell you he doesn’t think I’m up to the job?”
“I think you are,” she said.
Garrett neither needed nor wanted the consolation prize of Stephanie’s approval. And he certainly didn’t want her thinking it was any kind of motivation for him.
“Is there anything I can do to help with the pitch you’re working on?” she asked. “Maybe typing documents or searching the internet?”
“Nope.”
Stephanie stopped slicing, knife poised in midair, in one of those frozen moments he was getting used to. “Baby’s kicking,” she said.
“Uh-huh,” he said.
“Would you like to feel?” she asked.
He started. “You mean, touch your stomach?”
She beamed, and he remembered her smiling like that when he’d first met her. “You won’t get germs,” she promised.
“I’m good.” He dumped his bowl in the sink and rinsed it with a blast of cold water. “Time I left.”
After brushing his teeth, he grabbed his laptop bag. He called a goodbye to Stephanie in the split second before the door closed behind him.
* * *
BY THE TIME THEY NEARED the end of their tour of Brightwater’s Porchester College campus in Connecticut, Garrett was aggravated beyond measure.
He blamed Rachel. Something about holding her hand yesterday had made it impossible for him to ignore her, even when she was jabbering on at Clive about subjects of zero interest to Garrett. Yeah, she had quite a nice voice, but it was possible to have too much of a good thing.
She’d taken his agreement to pretend to be pleasant to his staff—a concession made purely because it disturbed him to witness her blind loyalty to the firm, loyalty that would bite her on her cute butt very soon—as an invitation to involve him in all kinds of conversations in which he had no interest.
So far, she’d asked his opinion of the new corporate values KBC had defined, whether he agreed it would be wonderful for working moms if the firm established a day-care center in that empty space on the fifty-fifth floor, and what would be the best retirement gift for Joseph King, one of the founding partners and the outgoing chief creative officer.
She was wanting him to care.
She was out of luck.
His lack of response had discouraged her—eventually—and she’d turned her attention to Clive. The two of them had vocally admired the campus facilities, and now, as they headed to the cafeteria for lunch, Clive was sharing some laid-back anecdote from his days as a student at Columbia.
“Did you go to college, Rachel?” Clive asked, when he’d finished his story. “I seem to recall you were pretty young when I joined KBC.”
She shook her head. “My folks were perpetually broke and I didn’t want to go into debt to get an education.”
Maybe that explained why she’d been looking so longingly around this place, Garrett thought. “Everyone has student loans,” he said, in case she was feeling sorry for herself. He’d had loans himself, despite his family’s comfortable finances. Dwight had believed Garrett should make his own way in the world, and since he hadn’t been “sensible enough” to have the military pay for his studies…
“I didn’t want to risk not being able to pay them back,” Rachel said.
“You cut off the whole possibility of an education and went to work in a mail room because you were scared?” Everything about her was irritating him today, most of all the fact that his gaze was constantly drawn to her against his will. Drawn to specific parts of her that he was suddenly weirdly aware of: legs, butt, hands, lips. Eyes. “That’s dumb.”
“It worked out perfectly,” she said. “I joined a wonderful firm that gave me the opportunity to move into account exec training within a year, and met some lovely people.”
“Oh, yeah, your surrogate family.” She sounded almost like an
orphan, but she’d said her family couldn’t afford college. “What’s wrong with your real family?” he asked. “Are your parents in jail? No, let me guess…a psychiatric institution?” he said with relish. That would make sense of Rachel’s bizarre hand-holding proclivities.
“Of course not,” she said coldly.
That’s better, Rach. Back off.
Clive chuckled. “What would you have studied if you’d gone to college, Rachel?” he asked.
She didn’t hesitate. “Optometry.”
Garrett would have pegged her for English lit or psychology, but he wasn’t about to ask. Clive, however, did.
“For some reason optometry just really appealed,” she said. “I loved biology.”
“Can’t have loved it that much, if you weren’t prepared to take out a loan to study it.” Garrett followed Rachel through the door to the cafeteria, which Clive held open.
“What did you study, Garrett?” she asked.
“Marketing, at Stanford.”
“So that’s when you fell in love with advertising,” she said as they lined up for their food.
There she went again, wanting him to care. “It’s a job,” he said.
Clive stacked so many cartons of French fries on his tray, you’d think they’d announced an imminent global shortage.
“That’s so unfair.” Rachel ladled minestrone into a bowl. “I love French fries, but if I eat them more than twice a week I blow up like a puffer fish.”
“I can imagine,” Garrett said, giving up the battle not to eye those long, slim legs again. He set his laptop bag on his tray while he fished inside for his wallet. His hand encountered a Saran-wrapped bundle. He pulled it out.
“What the hell?” he muttered. A pastrami sandwich. He turned it over, just to be sure.
Stephanie had made him a packed lunch. What was she trying to achieve?
“Garrett’s got a girlfriend,” Rachel chanted under her breath. Was it his imagination, or did she sound annoyed? He imagined she’d be pretty uptight to think he’d held her hand while he had a girlfriend.
“She isn’t my girlfriend,” he said. Not to reassure Rachel, he just didn’t want to assign Stephanie any role in his life. Whatever his father’s wife was playing at, she could quit right now. He wasn’t looking for a mommy to pack him a lunch. Even if she’d made a lucky guess that pastrami was his favorite.