Momentary Marriage

by Carol Rose

  “Yes.” And Amy would hate his being here now, he knew. Knew it and recoiled from lying to her. But this was something he had to do. How could he simply cut Kelsey out of his heart?

  So he’d broken their luncheon date, lied to Amy and said he had to work through lunch.

  “Amy’s the best,” Doug murmured, half to himself.

  “The very best,” Kelsey agreed from behind the curtain of her hair.

  Looking down at her, he remembered again the tough girl in high school. Mouthy with teachers and not intimidated by the roughest guys. Her spiritedness had drawn him like a magnet that first day.

  All the days and nights of his adolescence, Kelsey had been his ideal, her spunky attitude and beautiful face making her a prize worth winning.

  In a flash, he recalled the clench of Amy’s tight, silken body around his, the way she cried out his name as he drove into her over and over. In all his patient dreams of winning Kelsey’s love, he’d never really fantasized about making love to her, which was odd. Of course, when he was a kid, he’d fantasized about nailing everything that moved.

  Hell, as an adult he’d fantasized fucking women he’d seen walking down the street—it was a man thing—but not Kelsey anymore. Not for years had he actually thought about her as a sexual object. She belonged to that chivalrous, stronger-than-he-felt part of himself.

  How could he let her go? How could he give up on his longing to win a woman who could make him more than his ordinary, nice-guy self? More than the schlepping average-guy his father had been.

  He knew he ran the risk of alienating his boss by continuing to hover around Kelsey. There was a good chance his preoccupation with her would lose him a future with Amy. But how did a man break a habit of so many years?

  Doug worked at the knots in Kelsey’s shoulders, hearing her appreciative moan.

  A key clicked in the lock just then. With a suddenness belied by his immediate feeling of paralysis, Doug watched with horror as the apartment door swung open…and saw Amy coming through the doorway.

  Not Jared with a revolver in his hands, but still not good.

  “Hey, sis!” Amy called out. “The Calvary has—“

  She stopped then, shock, anger, hurt and disbelief hurrying over her face in a cavalcade of emotion.

  Damn! He swore to himself. He couldn’t buy a fucking break here!

  Kelsey’s head had lifted under his now-nerveless fingers. “Come in! Your beloved boyfriend has been acting the angel of mercy, but I’m sure you can out do him.”

  Amy slowly shut the door behind her. She turned, not meeting his eyes.

  Doug snatched his hands off of Kelsey, coming around the couch to take the shopping bag Amy held.

  “Here, I’ll put—“

  She moved, twitching the bag out of his reach.

  “I’ve got special chicken soup, several of your favorite videos to make you laugh,” Amy said with a hard cheerfulness in her voice as she spoke to her sister. “Remember laughter is supposed to make your immune system work better. And if that doesn’t help—fudge ripple ice cream.”

  Kelsey sighed her contentment. “I am a lucky woman. A sister who loans me her boyfriend for a neck rub and then brings me chicken soup and fudge ripple ice cream.”

  Sitting down next to her sister, Amy’s bright smile didn’t waver as she reached out to lay a hand on her forehead. “No fever. Any more tummy upset? Jared said you were up-chucking last night.”

  Flashing Doug a glittering glance, Amy met his eyes at last. She was furious, he knew it. Hell, any idiot would recognize the hostility emanating from her. If Kels hadn’t been so wiped out, she’d have instantly recognized the tension in the room.

  “Shall I warm the soup?” Doug asked, determined to act as innocent as he was. Dammit, it wasn’t as if he’d been ravishing her sister.

  “Kelsey, are you hungry?” Amy said with terrible brightness.

  “Yes,” Kelsey answered with a chuckle. “And no, I don’t have a fever and my stomach is just needing soup.”

  “I’ll warm the soup.” Doug advanced on the bag sitting at Amy’s feet, irrationally determined to wrest it from her if necessary. But she ignored him as he caught up the handles of the shopping bag and bore it into the kitchen.

  Crap. He was in deep shit here. He felt bad for lying to her, but was furious at himself for feeling apologetic. It wasn’t as if she’d found him fucking her sister! And where did she get off acting like she owned him, Doug fumed. They hadn’t made any promises to each other. She was being completely unreasonable!

  ***

  “Amy, wait!” Doug followed her down the stairs, hustling to keep up as she shot out of her sister’s apartment. The last hour had been a minefield of suppressed hostility until, at last, Jared had come home and he and Amy had gotten up to leave.

  “You have to listen to me,” he insisted angrily, catching her on the landing.

  Amy rounded on him furiously, her eyes spitting mad. “I don’t have to do a damn thing I don’t want to do and I don’t want to listen to you!”

  “Be reasonable. You’re over-reacting,” he insisted, exasperated. She had to know how much he cared about her.

  “Over-reacting!” she yelled, coming to a halt as they reached the lobby. “You son-of-a-bitch!”

  “Will you quiet down,” he demanded, getting angrier himself despite his efforts to keep his temper.

  “No, I will not,” Amy retorted, lowering her voice as a couple walked into the lobby and got into a waiting elevator. “You are a lying bastard!”

  “What exactly did I do?” he snapped, taking her by the arm and drawing her toward the outside door. “I finished early at the office and dropped by to see if your sister—“

  Amy jerked free of his hold. “You finished early at the office because you broke our lunch date so you could come here and drool over Kelsey! I talked to your secretary. She said you were in your office working through lunch. There was no ‘emergency meeting.’ You cancelled on me so you could sneak over here and be with Kelsey!”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” he commanded stiffly, quelling the impulse to take her by the shoulders and shake her.

  “Oh!” she jeered. “Look who’s talking! You’re the one who’s ridiculous! When will you get a clue? She doesn’t love you, has never loved you that way. There was never a chance—“

  “Why not?” he interrupted furiously. “Why was there never a chance of Kelsey falling for me? Because I’m ‘just Doug’? The perpetual nice guy? The guy who’s always there and always insignificant? Am I missing some genetic component that’s required to be a man?”

  “I don’t know,” Amy snapped. “Are you?”

  He grabbed her arm again, spitting his words out. “I’m the only damned man who’s ever been there for either one of you. The only person you can count on! Your own fucking father hasn’t bothered to check to see if you’re alive—“

  Doug recoiled as her hand flashed out, slapping him full across the face.

  They stood there, his fingers still wrapped around her arm, frozen in a tableau too horrific to be believed. Doug looked at her, tears glittering on her pale face, her dark eyes burning with anger and pain, and felt the twist of agony in his own gut.

  “I’m sorry,” he said instantly. “I shouldn’t have said that.”

  “No,” she said, her voice low and tight.

  “But I have been there for you and Kelsey. I deserve some credit for—“

  “You’ve been there for Kelsey,” Amy said. “I’ve always come second. And I’m not sure you really care for Kelsey. This is all about you.”

  “You aren’t second,” he blurted out before the rest of her accusation sank in. “What do you mean it’s all about me?”

  “If you really loved Kelsey,” Amy said, wiping at the tears on her cheeks, “you’d have known how she felt about you all these years. She loves you like a brother. She needs you like a brother.”

  “So I’m just supposed to accept that?” he de
manded, stung by her echoing of his own self-image. “And you say you’ve always been second!”

  “My sister and I aren’t the same,” Amy told him, pulling her arm free of his grasp. “She needs you to be like a brother to her. I’ve needed you—wanted you—like a lover.”

  Doug stood staring at her, shaken to the core by her words and the tears still sliding down her face.

  “But I’m through being your puppy dog. Always coming when you call, always patient with your problems.”

  “Amy,” he said, fear rippling through him. “Don’t—“

  “Go to hell,” she said with bitter conviction as she turned toward the glass doors. “Get lost. Go fuck yourself. You’re damn sure through fucking me! I’m through with you.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  “You told him what?” Kelsey asked her sister in dismay.

  “I’m through with him,” Amy said again, paused half in Kelsey’s office doorway. “He’s lied to me and shunted me aside for the last time.”

  “He actually said he had to work through lunch?”

  “Yes,” Amy answered, “then he hotfooted it over to see you on your sickbed.”

  “I’m sorry,” Kelsey said, her heart wrenching at the misery in her sister’s eyes. “I’m terribly sorry for making this so hard for you. It’s my fault.”

  “It’s not your fault,” Amy disagreed crisply. “You’ve done everything you can these last few months to get Doug over his crush. He’s just a jerk and he’s not worth my time.”

  “But you love him,” Kelsey reminded her, getting up from her desk to go over to where her sister stood. Her posture stiff and unyielding, her face a mask of unhappiness, Amy held a sheaf of file folders clutched to her chest like a shield.

  “Loving Doug hasn’t gotten me anything, but pain,” her sister said. “I’m giving up on him. I’ll find myself a man who doesn’t have his head half up his butt.”

  “I hate this for you, Sis,” Kelsey said, drawing Amy into a hug. “But maybe he’ll get the picture yet. Maybe he’ll come to his senses and realize what a treasure he had.”

  Tears glittered in Amy’s brown eyes. “I’m not holding my breath.”

  ***

  “Hello?” Kelsey grabbed the phone from her desk on the fifth ring. Reaching out with her free hand, she steadied the stack of files through which she’d been searching.

  “Kelsey?” Jared’s voice said in her ear. “Will you be finished by six this evening?”

  “Six?” Glancing at her watch, she couldn’t help but think how normal this was, a husband calling his wife at the office to see when she’d be home. Since the night she’d questioned him about his ethics with the union, they’d formed a truce of sorts, falling into an easy pattern. Coming home to the same apartment, sharing their lives and their bodies with a harmony that left her feeling both connected and scared.

  And now with Amy hating Doug, she couldn’t help feeling she’d put her own heart in peril for nothing.

  “I should be able to get away by six,” she told him, disturbed by the fluttering excitement in her stomach at the thought of going home to him. “Did you want something in particular?”

  “My sister, Carla, had her baby this morning,” he said, his voice warm with relief. “A girl. Now Macy will have a cousin to compete with.”

  “Macy will be thrilled,” Kelsey said with a laugh, remembering his niece’s playful ways. “Is Carla okay?”

  “Mom tells me it was such a fast, easy delivery that they didn’t get a chance to call me till it was over.”

  “What a relief.” She knew he’d been concerned about his sister’s health. With her due date having come and gone a week ago, Jared had taken to calling Carla every morning to offer her encouragement.

  “So if you’ll be through by six, I thought I’d pick you up and we’d go see them at the hospital.”

  “Tonight? Will she feel up to visitors so soon?” Kelsey protested, dragging herself out of her worry about Amy.

  “We’re not visitors,” he chided. “We’re family. Mom says Carla’s been resting this afternoon and she’s looking forward to introducing us all to her daughter.”

  Kelsey smiled. “Okay, then. Pick me up at the curb at six.”

  Three hours later, she gathered up her brief case and purse, locked her office and went to the elevator, more excited to see him than she should be. Every day that she lived with Jared, he seemed to draw her further into his life, his concerns. They slept in the same bed, their bodies cuddled in the dark and she’d grown so fond of their rhythm she sometimes woke forgetting that it wouldn’t be like that always.

  Those moments left her frightened for the future, but she wasn’t sure what to do about the growing sense of intimacy between them. They couldn’t spend a year fighting, she’d decided.

  She’d agreed to live with him for a year. Why hadn’t they foreseen that Doug and Amy might not make it? Why hadn’t she left herself an escape route?

  All day she’d been thinking about her sister’s sad, miserable face, thinking about how happy Doug had seemed these past few weeks. Despite her own wariness of the emotion, she couldn’t reconcile herself to Amy’s love for Doug coming to nothing.

  Riding down the elevator with seven or eight other people, she mused silently about the state of her strange marriage and all the issues between she and Jared.

  No further mention had been made between them of the union contract and she had no idea if or how it had been resolved. She didn’t want to ask him and spark that dark, withdrawn look in his eyes. Almost as if she’d hurt him somehow, although she couldn’t imagine why he should be upset by her questions.

  His integrity was his own business. She reminded herself of that at the same time she acknowledged that there were other men who looked after their wives when they were sick. Other men who smiled like he did. Who cared about their sisters?

  None of Jared’s good qualities changed the essential complication of the modern relationship. Men and women met and connected. Loved and lived together. And in ninety percent of those relationships, love changed or died. Love always died, from her observation. She had so many examples to contradict the idea of love lasting a lifetime.

  Except for Jared’s parents, apparently. They seemed to have found the Shangra La of marital connections.

  Exiting the elevator car behind a woman in a startling yellow pantsuit, Kelsey turned toward the door and spotted Jared’s gleaming Jaguar at the curb. The driver’s door was open and Jared leaned forward over the roof of the car, laughing and chatting with the doorman.

  Threading her way through the crowd of exiting employees, she went through the heavy glass doors at last, her heart beating hard in her chest. When would she get over this? When would coming home to him be just another part of an ordinary day?

  He turned then, his gaze connecting with hers and she felt a ripple of reaction through her body, as if he had that private, welcoming smile just for her.

  “All done?” he asked as she approached.

  “Yes.” She found herself smiling back at him as the doorman opened the car door for her.

  “Did you have a good day?” she asked him when she was settled into the luxurious leather seat, her seatbelt snug around her.

  Jared moved into the sluggish city traffic before saying, “Yes. Just hearing that Carla and the baby are all right made my day very good.”

  They got to the hospital fairly quickly despite the snarled traffic. Walking into the building, Jared reached out, catching her hand in his. Her fingers curved around his, an echoing warmth curling around her heart. Except for she and Amy, when had she ever been part of a family? One in which the roles were played by the same people year after year?

  After traversing a number of carpeted hallways, they found his sister’s room, the door open wide.

  “Come in,” Mary welcomed them, coming forward to hug them both. “Come see our new little bundle.”

  The small room at first seemed crammed with people
, but Kelsey soon recognized it was only close family. Jared’s brother and wife, their children and Carla’s husband all stood and sat around the hospital bed. The largest chair on the far side of the bed was occupied by Jared’s father. Tom Barrett held a small, quiet bundle in his steady arms, a beaming smile on his face.

  Jared made his way to the hospital bed, bending down to hug his sister carefully before reaching out to playfully spar with her husband. Mike feinted in response, both men laughing in the way of male bonding.

  “She’s beautiful, Kelsey,” Jared’s mother said, drawing her forward to stand next to Tom and peer down at the swaddled baby.

  Her breath feeling like a swelling balloon inside her, Kelsey looked down at the tiny pink face, the steady dark eyes startlingly like Jared.

  “She is beautiful.” There was no keeping the husky tone out of her voice. Glancing at Carla, Kelsey asked, “What are you naming her?”

  Carla’s face took on a comical expression. “We’re not sure yet! We have several names we like, but I think we’ve narrowed it down to Amelia or Nellie, after one of our grandmothers. We just can’t decide which grandmother!”

  “They’re both wonderful names,” Kelsey said, kneeling next to Tom and reaching out to stroke one finger over the back of the baby’s small hand. The long, slender fingers curled against the blanket, the baby’s skin soft as rose petals.

  “Well, Sis,” Brian teased, his own toddler daughter wiggling in his arms, “this is just the first of many difficult parenting decisions. Get used to it.”

  “She certainly is a peaceful little thing,” Mary commented, brushing her fingers over the child’s dark hair. “She must like being held by her Grandpa.”

  Tom smiled down at Amelia/Nellie. “The first of many occasions together, I’m sure.”

  He looked up then, exchanging a quick, intimate glance with his wife.

  “We’re holding you to that,” Mike said, laughing as he stood beside his wife’s hospital bed, her hand caught in his.

  Still kneeling at Tom’s feet, Kelsey was quiet, half-choked on the warmth and laughter in the room. She’d seen her own mother marry and live with six different men. Even though she couldn’t remember her own parents together, she knew they hadn’t shared an ounce of Tom and Mary Barrett’s love for each other.