by Jane Graves
Hell, yes, I am, you son of a bitch.
“One thing I didn’t understand, though.”
He lined up his next shot. “You told us your father lives in Fort Lauderdale. He’s never lived in Fort Lauderdale. He does, however, live in Plano.”
Tony paused. “That’s right.”
“You got any reason to lie about that, Tony?”
“My family is no concern of yours.”
“Your father appears to be respectable enough, so you’re not lying to cover up a shady past. I’m guessing it’s something between the two of you.”
“That’s none of your business.”
Fred nodded. “Fair enough. As long as it doesn’t affect Heather, I don’t give a damn.” He smacked the cue ball, sending it hard into the twelve ball, which dropped into the corner pocket. “In the end, I couldn’t come up with a solid reason to be suspicious, and since Heather seems to be happy, I decided to give you the benefit of the doubt.” Fred leaned over for his final shot—one a five-year-old kid could make. He knocked in the eight ball, then rose and leaned on his cue, fixing his gaze on Tony’s. “But I’m giving you fair warning. If I ever find out that you’ve done anything to hurt my daughter, you’re going to be answering to me. Do you understand?”
Tony couldn’t believe this. “I’d never do anything to hurt Heather,” he said hotly.
“Then there’s no problem, is there? You and I are going to get along just fine.”
But judging from the skepticism on Fred’s face, he clearly didn’t hold out a whole lot of hope for that. He eased away from the pool table, returned his cue to the rack, and sat back down at the table with the rest of the family.
Benefit of the doubt, my ass.
Barely keeping his anger in check, Tony walked back to the table, reaching it about the time everybody started checking their watches and standing up to leave. He kept his expression as pleasant as he could, enduring all of Heather’s huggy relatives, all the while feeling Fred’s gaze boring into him.
He and Heather waved good-bye to everyone, and the moment the door closed behind them, he turned and walked into his office. A few moments later, Heather appeared at the door.
“Okay,” she said. “What did my father say to you?”
Damn. Did she have to be so observant? “Nothing. We played pool.”
“I hope you don’t ever try your hand at cards. You have a lousy poker face.”
He bowed his head with a sigh of irritation. He didn’t want to deal with this. He just didn’t.
“Look, Tony. I know my father can sound very gruff, and it might seem as if he doesn’t like you, but—”
Tony snapped his head around. “Seem as if he doesn’t like me?”
“I don’t know what he said, but whatever it is, I think you’re reading too much into it.”
“Okay, Heather,” Tony said. “He told me that if I do anything to hurt you, I’m going to be answering to him. How many different ways are there to read that?”
Heather’s mouth dropped open. “He threatened you?”
“I spent my whole life being browbeaten by my father. I don’t need to be browbeaten by yours.”
“My father was a cop. He’s just suspicious, you know? He’ll get over it.”
“I won’t be around long enough for him to get over it.”
Heather nodded with resignation. “You’re ready for those annulment papers, aren’t you?”
“What?”
“Marriage isn’t your thing, and this is getting to be a little too much like a real one.”
She was right.
All at once, Tony felt smothered. As if he couldn’t breathe. All he wanted was to go back to the way his life was before—mindless and feel-good, with nobody making demands of him and nobody threatening him if he didn’t behave the way they thought he should.
He just wanted his old life back.
He put his elbows on his desk and rubbed his temples, then let out a heavy sigh. “Just go home, okay? I can handle things here.”
“I know you can. You proved that tonight.”
“What?”
“I meant to tell you earlier. You did a good job managing that crisis.”
“The water leak? Come on, Heather. That wasn’t really a crisis.”
“Yeah, but you didn’t know that. You did all the right things.” She gave him a small, bittersweet smile. “After the grand opening tomorrow night, you’ll be ready to handle everything by yourself. And that means you’re not going to need me anymore.”
With that, she turned around and left his office, closing the door behind her.
Tony sat there in silence, telling himself it was a good thing. He was more self-sufficient now. Things weren’t going to fall apart. But he just couldn’t imagine what it was going to be like when she was gone.
He muddled through the rest of the evening, trying to forget about the mess he’d created when he’d hatched this crazy plan with Heather. But later, in the quiet of his car on the way home, Fred’s words were still bouncing around inside his head. And when Tony came through his apartment door, the first thing he saw was the stack of gifts beside the fireplace.
Damn. What a mess.
He glanced over the fireplace at Granny Franny, who would be leaving when Heather did. Oddly enough, he was actually going to miss that ugly portrait. Then he thought about Heather in the other room, and he realized that McMillan’s wasn’t the only place he needed to stop depending on her.
Things had just gotten too complicated, particularly after what had happened tonight. It was time to begin the process of mentally pulling back. That way, by the time those annulment papers came, he could shake her hand, kiss her good-bye, and get on with the life he’d been living before without so much as a twinge of regret.
Heather lay awake in Tony’s bedroom, wishing her father hadn’t said what he had, because everything changed after that. She knew why he’d done it, but she also knew that Tony didn’t deserve a word of it. He’d never been anything but good to her, and it upset her to have her father think badly of him. But Tony was right. He wouldn’t be around long enough for her father to see just how wrong he was.
Finally she heard Tony coming down the hall. He pushed the door open and came into the bedroom.
She rose a little and propped the pillow behind her head. “Hey,” she said sleepily.
He looked surprised to see her awake. “Hey.”
“How did the rest of the night go?”
Tony started to take off his clothes. “It was fine.”
“Good. That’s good.”
A few moments later, he tossed his clothes aside and climbed into bed. He just lay there, staring at the ceiling, his arm draped across his forehead. When several minutes passed and he didn’t reach for her, Heather felt a rush of disappointment. He was probably feeling hemmed in, counting the days until he could go back to playing the field. She thought about the hope she’d had that maybe their relationship meant something more to him. Obviously that wasn’t the case. Clearly the good times they’d had together were wearing thin for him, and what had happened tonight had only made things worse.
“Tony?”
“Yeah?”
“I just wanted to say how sorry I am about what my father said to you.”
“You don’t have to apologize. You didn’t do anything.”
“I know. But you’ve done nothing these past weeks but try to keep me from being hurt, and now my father’s making you out to be the bad guy.”
“He’s pretty damned good at it, too. For a minute there, I could have sworn I was listening to my own father. It was a real nostalgic moment.”
Heather hated the bitterness she heard in his voice. “You said your father was tough to live with. But you never told me much about your mother.”
“That’s because I don’t remember much.”
“Did they fight a lot?”
“Yeah.”
“What about?”
He paused. “M
ostly about me.”
“You? Why?”
“My father thought my mother was too soft on me, and he was always trying to counteract that. I was just a little kid, but he thought I ought to act like a man, anyway.”
That single statement gave Heather a picture of exactly what Tony’s childhood must have been like. He’d had a loving mother who understood her child perfectly, a demanding father who didn’t, and there had been a whole lot of discord in between.
“A lot of fathers are at least a little bit like that with their sons, aren’t they?” she asked.
“It wasn’t just a little bit,” Tony said quietly.
There was a long silence, and for a moment, Heather thought he wasn’t going to say anything else. When he finally did speak again, his bitterness had only escalated.
“He was such a bastard,” Tony said, his voice little more than a whisper in the dark. “Once when I was five or six, he overheard my mother and me reading a book together. Peter Pan. My mother used to do Wendy’s and Tinkerbell’s voices, and I did Peter’s. My father came into the room and told my mother that no son of his would act like a flying fairy. They had a horrible fight, and the book ended up in the trash.”
“But it was just Peter Pan,” Heather said. “All little kids should be able to read books like that.”
“Not according to my father. But I loved that book so much that my mother bought another copy and hid it in her dresser drawer. She brought it out only when he wasn’t there. I can still hear her whispering, ‘Just don’t tell your father.’”
Tony had told her how difficult his relationship with his father had been, but Heather had thought it was pretty much confined to his teenage years. She hadn’t realized how torn apart his whole childhood had been. He’d spent it in two different worlds—his mother’s filled with dreams and laughter, and his father’s filled with rules and recriminations.
Now she knew. She knew just how deeply Tony’s resentment ran. This wasn’t just leftover discord between a man and his teenage son. This had roots in something older and much more hurtful.
“Your mother died when you were ten,” Heather said. “What was it like with your father then?”
“He was transferred all the time. And he wasn’t home much. I guess that was a good thing.”
“So you were alone a lot?”
“Oh, no. I had company. The domestic staff was usually pretty friendly, assuming they spoke English.”
Heather could only imagine how lonely he must have felt in a foreign place with no family around him at all.
“One Christmas Eve,” Tony said, “my father was at some embassy dinner or something. I was home alone. I remember surfing around on the TV and landing on It’s a Wonderful Life. About the only other things on were a Seinfeld rerun I’d seen half a dozen times and Catholic Mass, so I watched it.”
In the dim moonlight streaming in through the window, Heather could see the curve of his throat, the silhouette of his eyelashes. He blinked quickly a few times, then swallowed hard.
“I felt like that guy.”
“That guy?”
“In the movie.”
“George Bailey?”
“Yeah. Everywhere I turned, it seemed as if my life was going to hell. My mother was dead. My father wasn’t there very much, and when he was, he rode my ass constantly. I had no place to call home. Every house we lived in after my mother died seemed ice-cold to me. My father hired a whole army of domestic help and made sure whatever house we lived in was spit-polished from the floor to the ceiling. Our houses smelled like disinfectant all the time. I couldn’t so much as put a damned poster on the wall of my bedroom without catching hell for it.”
Oh, God. And what had she done? Cleaned his apartment within an inch of its life. Chastised him for anything that was out of place. She wanted to leap up right then and scramble things in the pantry or throw dirt back on the kitchen floor.
“My father had always been unreasonable,” Tony went on. “When my mother was alive, she ran interference. When she was gone, I bore the whole brunt of it. We moved all the time, so I had no real friends. Yeah, I always had the guys laughing or the girls chasing me, but not one of them ever knew what I was really thinking.”
Tony’s voice was barely more than a whisper in the dark, an eerie reflection of something inside him that he never allowed to see the light of day. If only he’d had a loving family to fall back on, all the upheaval would have been okay. But he hadn’t.
“As I sat there in front of that movie that night,” he went on, “I didn’t think there was anybody who would know or care if I lived or died. When George Bailey said he wished he’d never been born, I remember thinking, ‘I hear you, George. I wish I’d never been born, too.’ I missed my mother. Most of the time, I could put it out of my mind. But on that Christmas Eve, when I was all alone . . .”
“What?”
“I cried. I was a sixteen-year-old boy, and they sure as hell don’t cry. Not when they have Don McCaffrey for a father. But that night I swear I cried myself to sleep.”
And as she pictured that lost, lonely boy, Heather wanted to cry herself. “But the movie had a happy ending. George realized just how many friends he had.”
“I don’t have any friends.”
“Tony, you have more friends than anyone I’ve ever known. I saw your address book. And how about all the people at the bar? Andy and Kyle?”
“Friends? Those are people I drink with. Play pool with. They’re not friends. I could fill a thousand-page book with the things they don’t know about me.”
“What about me?” she asked.
“What?”
“I’m your friend.”
“Maybe for now, but we’ll be splitting up soon.”
“That doesn’t mean we can’t still be friends.”
“It won’t work that way. You’ll go back to your life, and I’ll go back to what I was doing before we met.”
“Playing the field?”
“You should always stick with what you’re best at.”
“Someday that’ll change. You’ll decide you want a wife and family.”
“Heather, I know it’s been good between us for a few weeks now. But we’ve just been playing house. No pressure, no long-term commitment. You know where I come from. I couldn’t hold up my end of a real marriage if my life depended on it.”
A real marriage.
In that moment, Heather realized just how real their fake marriage had become to her. But Tony was right. This wasn’t real, and he’d never led her to believe for one moment that he wanted it to be.
“So I guess we’ll be saying good-bye soon,” Heather said.
“Yeah, I guess so. But I’m pretty good at it. I’ve spent half my life saying good-bye.”
Watching Tony from afar, he seemed like a congenial, accessible, friendly man, with a good word and a backslap for everyone. She’d never had any idea how many walls he’d put up around himself and why he kept his relationships with everyone, including women, at arm’s length. She’d thought his friendliness and outgoing nature were gifts. He might use them to his advantage, but they weren’t gifts. They were symptoms. Symptoms of something deep inside him so raw and painful he refused to touch it. In so many ways, he was still that scared kid who thought the only way to protect himself was to wrap up his feelings into a tight little knot and never let anyone inside.
Tony rolled to his side and looked at her. “Heather?”
“Yeah?”
“There’s no way I can ever repay you for what you’ve done for me.”
The sound of his voice—so heartfelt and sincere—sent shivers down Heather’s spine.
“It was no big deal,” she said.
“No. It was a very big deal. I wouldn’t have been able to buy the bar if not for you.”
“Now, Tony,” she said. “What kind of wife would I be if I didn’t support my husband one hundred percent?”
She expected him to laugh a little and say somet
hing flippant, but he didn’t. Instead he looked at her intently.
“When we break up, I want you to tell everyone it was your decision. That you’re divorcing me.”
“But why? We can tell them it was mutual.”
“No. I don’t want anyone thinking I was the one who didn’t want to be married to you. Do you understand? I don’t care what you tell them, as long as you make me out to be the bad guy. Your father already thinks that. It won’t be a tough sell.”
“No. I’m not going to let them think badly of you.”
“It doesn’t matter, Heather. I’ll never see them again. You’ll see them for the rest of your life.”
She smiled. “How about I tell them you wore me out in bed? That I’m leaving you for my own self-preservation?”
She waited for his snappy comeback. It never came.
“Promise me,” he said.
She nodded. “Okay.”
“Thank you,” he murmured. “For everything.”
“I should thank you, too.”
“What for?”
“For keeping your promise. You told me that if I showed you how to make your business a success, you’d show me how to have more fun than I’ve ever had in my life.” She smiled softly. “That’s exactly what you’ve done.”
He reached up to stroke his thumb along her cheek, staring at her intently. Up to now, he’d been a wonderful lover, making sex more fun than she’d ever imagined. But now there was something else in his eyes.
“I shouldn’t do this,” he murmured so softly she could barely hear him. “It’ll only make things harder.”
He pulled her into his arms and kissed her, and this time when they made love, there was no laughter between them. Not even a smile. Instead, he made love to her with an aching kind of tenderness that went straight to her heart.
After tonight, she knew why he thought this would only make things harder. When the day finally came for them to part, Tony needed desperately not to care. And it was the first time Heather realized just how much he did.
Heather had long since fallen asleep, but Tony lay awake, thinking about how their time together was almost over. The grand opening was tomorrow night, Regina’s wedding the day after that. They’d let a little bit of time pass, and then they’d tell the world that no matter how compatible they seemed to be, they had irreconcilable differences and they were splitting up.