Summer Pleasures

by Nora Roberts

  “Shade, please.” Giving in to the weakness, she dropped her head on his shoulder. “I didn’t want to complicate things. I don’t want to now. If I fly back, it’ll give us both time to put things back in perspective. My work, your work—”

  “Are important,” he finished. “But not as important as this.” He waited until her eyes slowly lifted to his. Now his voice was calm again. His grip eased, still holding her but without the desperation. “Nothing is, Bryan. You didn’t want it, maybe I thought I didn’t, but I know better now. Everything started with you. Everything important. You make me clean.” He ran a hand through her hair. “God, you make me hope again, believe again. Do you think I’m going to let you take all that away from me?”

  The doubts began to fade, quietly, slowly. Second chances? Hadn’t she always believed in them? Long shots, she remembered. You only had to want to win badly enough.

  “No,” she murmured. “But I need a promise. I need the promise, Shade, and then I think we could do anything.”

  So did he. “I promise to love you, to respect you. To care for you whether you like it or not. And I promise that what I am is yours.” Reaching up, he flipped open the cupboard door. Speechless, Bryan watched him draw out a tiny cardboard pot of pansies. Their scent was light and sweet and lasting.

  “Plant them with me, Bryan.”

  Her hands closed over his. Hadn’t she always believed life was as simple as you made it? “As soon as we’re home.”

  Epilogue

  “Cooperate, will you?”

  “No.” Amused, but not altogether pleased, Shade watched Bryan adjust the umbrellas beside and behind him. It seemed to him she’d been fiddling with the lighting a great deal longer than necessary.

  “You said I could have anything I wanted for Christmas,” she reminded him as she held the light meter up to his face. “I want this picture.”

  “It was a weak moment,” he mumbled.

  “Tough.” Unsympathetic, Bryan stepped back to study the angles. There, the lighting was perfect, the shadows just where they should be. But… A long-suffering sigh came out. “Shade, stop glowering, will you?”

  “I said you could take the picture. I didn’t say it’d be pretty.”

  “No chance of that,” she said under her breath.

  Exasperated, she brushed at her hair and the thin gold band on her left hand caught the light. Shade watched it glimmer with the same sort of odd pleasure he always felt when it hit him that they were a team, in every way. With a grin, he joined his left hand with hers so that the twin rings they wore touched lightly.

  “Sure you want this picture for Christmas? I’d thought of buying you ten pounds of French chocolate.”

  She narrowed her eyes, but her fingers laced with his. “A low blow, Colby. Dead low.” Refusing to be distracted, she backed off. “I’ll have my picture,” she told him. “And if you want to be nasty, I’ll buy my own chocolate. Some husbands,” she continued as she walked back to the camera set on a tripod, “would cater to their wife’s every whim when she’s in my delicate condition.”

  He glanced down at the flat stomach under baggy overalls. It still dazed him that there was life growing there. Their life. When summer came again, they’d hold their first child. It wouldn’t do to let her know he had to fight the urge to pamper her, to coddle her every moment. Instead, Shade shrugged and dipped his hands in his pockets.

  “Not this one,” he said lightly. “You knew what you were getting when you married me.”

  She looked at him through the viewfinder. His hands were in his pockets, but he wasn’t relaxed. As always, his body was ready to move, his mind moving already. But in his eyes she saw the pleasure, the kindness and the love. Together they were making it work. He didn’t smile, but Bryan did as she clicked the shutter.

  “So I did,” she murmured.