“Works for me.”
And actually, that hadn’t been awkward. The water ran, followed by the sound of teeth being brushed. Max had very likely raised the topic of contraception when out of sight as a courtesy to Jeannie’s newfound self-consciousness. She undressed the rest of the way, but appropriated Max’s T-shirt and sat on the bed until he emerged from the bathroom.
“I will never wash that T-shirt again. It looks much better on you, by the way. Bathroom’s all yours.”
He was so relaxed, so casual. He propped a shoulder on the bathroom doorjamb and crossed his arms over his chest. He was somewhat aroused, well endowed, and apparently at ease with both realities.
“I expect Henry to wake at any moment,” Jeannie said. “Somehow, motherhood equates to not deserving any pleasure.”
“Is it motherhood, or the post-divorce self-shaming syndrome? Once bit, twice shy, with a side helping of why bother when I always screw it up?” He pushed away from the door, ambled over to the bed, and turned down the covers. How could even a naked man in great shape look sexy doing something so pedestrian?
“You speak from experience?” Jeannie asked.
“How ’bout you use the facilities, and then you can tromp around in my head all you please, Jeannie Cromarty. That boy won’t nap forever.”
“No,” Jeannie said, rising from the bed. “But he does nap daily, sometimes twice.” She brushed a hand over Max’s lean flank and crossed to the bathroom.
He was in the bed when she emerged, sitting up against the headboard and looking entirely at home. The bedroom was a compromise between respect for the past, which would have covered every surface in tartan wool if the Victorian “mad for plaid” craze hadn’t been contained, and sensible comfort. The bed was a huge four-poster covered with a simple brown cotton and velour duvet, while the extra blanket was a brown, red, cream, and black plaid.
The walls were half-paneled oak, the rugs forest green on oak parquet flooring, while the wing chairs continued the plaid motif. The fireplace and mantel were a pinkish marble, the drapes brown.
A masculine room, putting Jeannie in mind of the trees that surrounded her holiday cottage. Max Maitland fit in here. Physically, the high ceilings, substantial furniture, and floor-to-ceiling windows were on the right scale for him.
Emotionally, the emphasis on comfort and practicality suited him too, which sent a pang of sadness through Jeannie as she climbed under the covers. If she wasn’t careful, she could fall hard for Max Maitland—harder than she already had, and for all the right reasons. She’d fallen for Harry MacDonald for the wrong reasons—loneliness, boredom, the creeping fear of never finding a true partner.
“Come here,” Max said, holding out his arms. “I am considering strategy, and I’m sure I’ll do that better while I hold you and you hold me.”
Oh yes. Jeannie snuggled up to his side, wrapped an arm around his middle, and rested a thigh across his legs.
“You smell good, Max Maitland. Up close,”—she sniffed his chest—“you smell clean and… manly.” An old-fashioned word, much ridiculed, but appropriate for him and the open forest scent he wore. “Will you tell me of your bout with post-divorce self-shaming sour grapes?”
His hand traced a slow pattern on Jeannie’s back, and for a moment, she thought he might not answer. Why in blazes had she put on his T-shirt when she might instead have been skin to skin with him?
“I haven’t gone through a divorce, but my parents split up. Mom never dated. I don’t think Dad did either.”
“This has to do with your sister.”
“Any kid with a special-needs sibling is handed an impossible riddle. You have to be a normal kid, because your parents and your siblings desperately need you to be normal. Get good grades, have friends, go out for sports. You have to be the normal kid, but you also have to never need anything. Clearly, your sibling deserves all the help and support there is to give. You can’t be jealous, you can’t be resentful, you can’t lose your temper or let anybody down.”
Jeannie shifted over him, so she straddled his hips. “But it’s normal to be jealous, and resentful, to occasionally get mad, or drop the ball. That’s part of growing up in a family.”
His gaze was bleak. “I had no older siblings, no close cousins. Somebody forgot to send me the memo about flaws being normal, though Maura’s counselors at some point hauled me in for a few family sessions and put some of the pieces together for me. Maura, who has more on the ball than most of her cottage mates and friends, gets a dose of the same dynamic. She’s high-functioning enough that she’s the one who can’t take up precious resources needed by other members of the household. I connected my own dots belatedly.”
Jeannie kissed him and slid down onto his chest. “Family is such a challenge.” Though at the moment, she was overwhelmingly grateful for the family she had and for the child sleeping down the hall. Henry was stubborn and demanding, but he’d never spent a night in hospital. He was developmentally on track and so easy to love.
She waited, hoping Max might say more, but instead he threaded his hand through her hair and tipped her chin within kissing range.
If he was in a hurry, it was a luxuriously steady, luscious hurry. He moseyed his tongue into her mouth, teasing, exploring, and waking up parts of her far distant from her lips. His previous kisses had been enthusiastic, skilled, and interesting. This kiss was… relentlessly intimate.
Jeannie wanted it to go on forever, and she wished some magic, extra set of hands might ditch the T-shirt she was wearing, because she was too busy touching—
Max eased the hem of the T-shirt up, inch by inch. Jeannie paused the kissing long enough that he could slip the shirt over her head and toss it to the foot of the bed.
“Where were we?” he asked.
“We were fetching your jimmy hat, because I’m this close to losing my self-restraint.”
“Already?”
He looked far too pleased with himself. Jeannie got a hand around his arousal and stroked the smugness right off his face.
“I haven’t your reserves of restraint, apparently,” she said, easing her hand up and down his shaft. “I’m weak like that. I get naked, I start kissing, the next thing you know—”
Max arched into her grip. “I’m as hard as Scottish granite and trying to recite the Greek alphabet backward because you have exactly the right touch, exactly the right rhythm, exactly the right—condoms are in the nightstand.”
Jeannie dealt with the condom—no frills—and shifted down to her back. “Up you go.”
“I love a woman who knows who and what she wants.”
The word love pricked a growing balloon of desire. Max Maitland did not love her, had all but promised he never would, and that was fine… just fine. Henry already had one male role model dodging on and off stage, he didn’t need—
Max settled over her. “Where did you go, Jeannie?” His gaze held concern and tenderness. His touch as he brushed his fingers over her brow was devastatingly gentle.
“I’m here,” Jeannie said. “Right now, I’m here and so are you.” She tried for a smile and suspected she wasn’t fooling Max. The mood had acquired an edge of wishes unspoken and dreams ignored.
They could still have pleasure, though, so as Max eased into her body and the lovely physical sensations of intimate joining pushed aside regret, Jeannie gave herself up to that indulgence. She held nothing back, saved nothing for next time or later or any of the impossible wishes. She gave and received pleasure until the room spun and her heart spun with it, until everything else fell away, even regret, even dreams that could not come true.
Henry scowled at Max with all the disapproval of a child who well knew that his age entitled him to break into a loud bout of stranger anxiety.
“We’re buds,” Max said, scooping the baby from amid his blankets. “Buds hang out together while your mom catches up on her sleep. She’ll be happier for getting some rest, and we both like when she’s happy. Got it?”
/> Henry slapped him on the cheek.
“We’ll work on that rabbit punch some fine day when your mom isn’t likely to interrupt us.” No, actually they wouldn’t, and Max had the sense Henry knew BS when he heard it. “You hungry?”
Henry yawned.
“Time for a wardrobe change,” Max said when Henry’s diaper proved to be damp. “That apple juice must be quicker than beer. The magic dido bag is in the kitchen, where another piece of pizza might be in order.”
Jeannie was a fierce and tender lover, as Max had suspected she’d be. Even in sleep, she’d kept hold of his hand, wrapped an arm around his waist, or otherwise maintained a physical connection. None of that wham-bam-get-lost-Sam stuff. She cuddled with as much conviction as she kissed.
Max dealt with Henry’s diaper, but knew better than to put the baby back in the high chair. That would signal time to eat, which it might not be. The baby carrier would mean time for a walk, which was also not going to happen.
“So I’ll do the one-armed-bandit thing,” Max said when he’d washed his hands. “I’ll introduce you to the arcane science of decoding the weekly project report. Boring as hell—don’t tell your mom I said hell. Boring as… chopping veggies? You’d probably like chopping veggies, terrifying your mom by playing with a sharp object. All those pretty colors, and all that food can go into your mouth, which according to infants is the natural order decreed by God.”
Max had talked to Maura the same way when she’d been a baby, because a language delay had been one of her predictable afflictions.
“A slight delay, thank heavens, though it’s both receptive and expressive language, meaning she has feelings she can’t talk about, and she doesn’t grasp what’s said to her as easily as it might appear.”
Other times, Maura comprehended more on sheer intuition than Max could figure out with reason, two professional degrees, and a fair amount of logic.
Henry grabbed the collar of Max’s T-shirt—a clean T-shirt, because Jeannie might want to wear the other one again—and pulled.
“Right. Time to get to work.”
Though it took time, Max got himself, Henry, and the laptop arranged at the table with the mouse out of Henry range, and assorted toys—an hourglass egg timer, napkin rings in primary colors, Bear-Bear—within snatch-and-grab distance.
The work went slowly, in part because Max’s mind kept drifting back to Jeannie, snuggled up in that big bed, exhausted on a level probably only another single parent could grasp. He should not have become intimate with her, because…
“Because I didn’t listen to my own public service announcement,” Max muttered. “No long-term potential here. Nothing to see, nobody to fall in love with. Just keep moving, until…”
Until when? Maura was twenty-two and had transitioned through the gap years of eighteen to twenty-one, when the child-protection safety net and the adult-services safety net each pretended the other organization “had more to offer the client.”
Max had never been so grateful to have a legal degree as when he’d been begging and browbeating Maura’s various service agencies into doing their part for her.
“How did you get that?” He gently pried the mouse from Henry’s fingers and turned the egg timer upside down. “You’re not helping me with these reports, micro-dude.”
Though holding Henry felt wonderful. He was a happy little guy, ready to take on the world, provided his mama loved him, his diaper bag never went empty, and his belly was occasionally full. With luck, boy could grow up happy even without a father on the scene, though Max did not envy Jeannie and Henry the challenge they faced.
“Though you have first-rate fine motor skills too.”
“Muh.”
“Give it a month or two, you’ll be ordering everybody around. You can tell your mom you love her too.” Something Max would not say, no matter that it was probably already true. “Maybe Fergus will listen to you better than he listens to me.”
That was the other factor making the weekly review go more slowly. Max was double-checking the spreadsheets, manually verifying totals, and coming up with discrepancies. Spreadsheets were tricky—a mistake could ripple on for pages, and mistakes were easy to make when rushing through a job.
He was still muttering over his figures, entertaining Henry, and occasionally swearing, when Jeannie padded into the kitchen wrapped in a Black Watch plaid bathrobe, and a pair of Max’s hiking socks on her feet.
“I slept like the dead,” she said, going straight to the fridge. “I don’t know whether to thank you, or be horrified that you left the bed to stare at that computer. Is that my son making free with Mrs. Hamilton’s napkin rings?”
Her hair was disheveled, her cheek still bore a crease from the pillow, and her bathrobe and socks—Elias’s bathrobe and Max’s socks—were Not Sexy At All. Max had never seen a lovelier sight.
“I’ve found a few discrepancies on Fergus’s spreadsheets. He needs to do more cross-checking, because problems like this can snowball.”
Jeannie set the leftover pizza on the counter. “I’m famished. Shall I heat some up for you?”
The domesticity of the offer yanked on a heartstring Max needed to ignore. “Please, and I think my boss will be getting hungry again soon too. He woke up wet, though he was bearing up manfully.”
While Max was barely coping with some confluence of emotions—desire, of course, but also affection, longing, regret, resentment, protectiveness... A damned mess that he wouldn’t trade for all the spreadsheets in Maryland.
Jeannie turned the oven on and stood with her back to Max. “You heard the baby and I didn’t?”
Max rose and set Henry in the high chair. “Don’t do that. Don’t do the mommy guilt because you found all of two hours to enjoy yourself and rest. I did not hear Henry. He was barely stirring, and you started scooting around in bed. You woke me up, then I decided to check on Henry. He might well have gone back to sleep, but I had to stick my big nose into his room, and then he decided to wake up after all. I suspect you heard him, and in another two minutes, you would have been trudging across the hall to step and fetch for him.”
She’d turned to regard Max as he’d delivered that tirade, her expression wary. Now she crossed the kitchen and hugged him.
“I slept very well, thank you. I feel like a new woman, and I’m grateful for the rest. Shall we get into the bread pudding too? Dinnertime is nearly upon us. If we eat early, I can be back in Perth before dark.”
He should tell Jeannie that sounded like a fine plan, but instead he wanted to put a hand gently over her mouth. To stop the soft flow of words, the pragmatic good cheer. She remained wrapped around him, suggesting that pragmatic good cheer had cost her—some consolation.
“Why not stay the night?” Max said. “If you have plans, then don’t let me interfere with them, but my weekend will be mostly paperwork and scheduling. I’ve been warned that one of my investors might drop by, and I only have one more weekend before I’m supposed to do my first hop back to the States.”
Don’t beg.
Jeannie nuzzled his neck. “This is when I’m supposed to say, that’s a lovely offer, but I really must be going. Thanks for… everything.”
Don’t say it. Please don’t say it. “You have to do what’s right for you, Jeannie—for you and Henry. I’d love to have the company.” He stopped short of utter folly: Maybe you could come up again some other weekend, or I could see you in Perth. No reason you should have to do all the driving in this non-relationship that isn’t going anywhere, ever.
“I think the change of scene is good for Henry,” she said. “He’s beginning to notice a world beyond himself and his mother, and he’s taken to you more readily than to most of my family members. Then too,”—Jeannie kissed Max’s cheek—“you let me get some sleep. We’ll stay until tomorrow morning.”
Over Jeannie’s shoulder, Max winked at Henry. Henry grinned back, and for a moment, life was sweet.
“Let’s put the hurt to that pizza
,” Max said, “and then I’d like to show you some of Fergus’s reporting. I’m not worried yet, but my site foreman and I need to have a talk.”
“Eat first,” Jeannie said, easing away. “Business later.”
“What time does Henry go to bed?”
She set the pizza in the oven and fiddled with the timer. “Not soon enough, but if you want him to go to bed, that means he’ll be awake until at least midnight.”
“No way I can stare at Fergus’s reports until midnight.” Particularly not if Jeannie was in the same room.
Even before her wedding, Jeannie had reconciled herself to the notion that Harry MacDonald was full of charm, but not exactly affectionate. If he hugged his wife, he’d soon be kissing his wife, and from there, insinuating his hands beneath her clothes was—in his mind—the expected progression.
Harry had been a restless sleeper, thrashing about rather than settling into a cozy, dreamy embrace. Then Jeannie had conceived, and nocturnal trips to the loo had become more frequent. Harry had decamped to the sofa, claiming he didn’t want to inadvertently add to Jeannie’s sleep deprivation.
Matters had deteriorated further when Henry had arrived, with Jeannie more often stealing night naps beside Henry’s crib, Harry on the sofa, and nobody at all in the bedroom.
Max, by contrast, was a team sleeper. He’d spooned himself around Jeannie, a warm, friendly companion who knew how to remain comfortably close without octopus-ing his bed partner out of real rest. She’d woken in the middle of the night only once to find Max’s side of the bed empty.
In the apartment’s barely lit living room, she’d spied Max giving Henry the three a.m. bottle, the two of them rocking slowly in a chair by the empty hearth.
She’d sneaked back to bed, tears threatening. A few minutes later, a lullaby had drifted from Henry’s bedroom, and Jeannie had pulled a pillow over her head. When she was an old, old woman, she’d still recall the sound of Max Maitland singing her son to sleep.
She shrugged the memory aside and refocused on the task at hand. Henry was in his backpack, wreaking havoc with Max’s hair, while Jeannie clicked from screen to screen on the laptop Fergus kept in the solar. Breakfast down at the Hall had been cheerful, nutritious, and full of post-coital smiles, because the third condom had met its fate as the sun had risen.
Scotland to the Max Page 16