by Daphne Clair
“Keeping myself awake,” she said. “It’s been a tiring few days.”
“Don’t work yourself too hard. I’ll help Glen shift things out of the bedroom tomorrow night.”
“You’ve been awfully helpful. Thank you.”
“I wanted to do it.”
“Why?”
“You think I have an ulterior motive?”
“Don’t you always?”
He laughed. “Below the belt, Paige. And untrue.”
“Is it?” she asked wistfully. “I don’t know.”
He frowned at her. “Have you the faintest idea what you’re talking about? Because I don’t.”
“Maybe not, maybe it’s the wine.” She had just begun to grasp at a thought but it eluded her. Somehow it seemed important and yet she couldn’t put it into words. “Did you ever really love me?”
His eyes darkened, and his face became a mask. The words hung in the air between them. She despised herself for uttering them. But the question had been lurking in her subconscious for years. Right back to the very first time he’d told her he loved her, and she’d wanted so much to believe it that she’d pushed aside her instinctive doubt and decided to ride the dream.
“What do you think?” he said, turning the question back at her. “My God, if you have to ask me…”
“Did you?” she said. “Or did you think you were marrying my father’s money?” It was too late to retract, and suddenly she desperately needed an answer.
He looked as though he would rather kill her. She blinked at the ferocity in his stare, in his voice when at last he spoke, the tone shockingly at odds with the words.
“I thought the world revolved around you,” he said. “That the moon and stars would disappear into black, endless night if you left me. When that happened, I thought I’d die. The sun would never shine again and nothing in the wide world could ever make things right. You were the center of my soul and the thing that kept my heart beating, you gave me a reason for taking every breath. Does that sound like love?”
Paige was dizzy. She couldn’t speak. Her lips parted, but while she was trying to fumble words to her tongue he laughed, making her cringe. “I was wrong, of course,” he said almost conversationally. “The world didn’t stop and I went on breathing, and eating and walking around. Everything continued just as before, until one day I realized how little it had all mattered, really.”
How little she had mattered? Paige swallowed a lump of unreasonable hurt.
He went on, “One more broken heart doesn’t stop the world. One woman had let me down—but there were plenty of other women around, once I stopped nursing my wounds and feeling sorry for myself.”
“You didn’t marry any of them!” she blurted, stung by a shaft of unwarranted jealousy.
“Like I said, I don’t make the same mistake twice.”
“Neither do I.”
He was silent for a moment. “So you don’t want another wedding ring from me?”
Immediately she repudiated that. “Good God, no! Didn’t we make enough of a mess of it the first time?”
His laughter this time signaled genuine amusement. “At least we agree on that.” He gave her a long, considering look. “But the sex was great. It still is…judging by the night of Maddie’s wedding.”
Paige wasn’t sure what was causing the hollowed feeling in her midriff. Any relationship involving sex was out of the question. She tilted her head in defiance. “I don’t want a wedding ring,” she said, “and I won’t sleep with you, either.”
“Impasse,” he drawled, looking as though he couldn’t take it seriously.
Uneasy, she tried to hide it, refusing to look away from the glinting green eyes. “Are you going to call that cab?”
He didn’t move immediately, but then with a faint shrug he crossed to the telephone on the wall and dialed. “Don’t let me keep you up,” he said as he turned after hanging up. “I’ll wait for it outside.”
Paige nodded. “Good night, then.”
“Good night.” He started to make for the door, then swerved and fetched up in front of her again. Not touching her with his hands, he bent and brushed a kiss against her mouth. “Sweet dreams.”
She stood rock-still, her hands unconsciously clenched at her sides as he let himself out.
The following evening the men moved the furniture and laid the first coat of polish on the bedroom floor.
Maddie and Glen left but Jager lingered by the open door. He said, “What’s the next step, Paige?”
She chose to take him literally. “Stripping the walls ready for hanging new papers, painting skirtings.”
“Need help with that?”
“Not really. I’m in no hurry and it gives me something to do.”
He frowned at her. “Why so desperate?”
“Desperate?”
“To fill every waking moment.” He reached out and took one of her hands, ignoring her surprised resistance. Turning it in his, he studied her palm. It was roughened from working on the garden and in the house, and she had tiny blisters on the pads below her fingers. “Why are you doing this to yourself?” he asked.
Paige pulled away. “I’m enjoying finding what’s hidden away under those layers of paint and paper. Once all that’s stripped off this place will be beautiful, the way it was when it was first lived in by people who loved and cared for it.”
“Loved it? How do you know that?”
“Laugh if you like, but I sense it was a home where people were secure and happy.”
“I’m not laughing.” He was looking at her curiously. “Were you secure and happy—before your husband died?”
Paige blinked at him, disconcerted at the change of subject. “Yes. Very happy.”
He searched her face as if he wanted to catch her out in a lie. But it wasn’t a lie, and she stared fearlessly back at him. Finally he gave a curt nod. “I’m glad.”
He looked around them. “Do you think a house can give that back to you?”
“I think it’s what I need right now.”
“But not all you need.”
She agreed cautiously. “I need my family too. My job. Friends.”
“Is that enough?”
“For now.”
“It isn’t much.” He sounded almost contemptuous.
“It’s a lot. Plenty of people don’t have those things.”
“True.” A corner of his mouth turned down.
Paige bit her lip. He wasn’t reminding her, but when they’d met he’d been unemployed, friendless in a strange city, and had no one. She said, “I don’t mean to reopen old wounds.”
He smiled tightly. “They don’t hurt anymore.”
“You found your family—your father.”
“He found me. I wasn’t looking.”
That was a surprise. “I thought you must have…”
“Changed my mind?” He shook his head. “I don’t need him.”
That’s what he’d said when he’d told her that his father was some spoiled rich kid who had got a teenage girl pregnant and then scarpered. His name didn’t even appear on Jager’s birth certificate. Now he added, with the same note of indifference verging on contempt, “If he’s discovered some need to salve his conscience after all this time, it’s no skin off my nose.”
“Don’t you feel anything for him?”
Hands in his pockets, he regarded her. “Should I?”
“He’s your father, and I know it’s late in the day, but if he went to the trouble of finding you, he must have some sense of…responsibility.”
Jager laughed. “I’m responsible for myself. Always have been. That’s not going to change.”
“How did he find you?” Paige moved to the couch and sat down.
After a moment Jager followed, sitting half facing her on the other end, one arm draped along the back. “He hired a detective. The guy found the aunt up north who cared for me after my mother walked out on me.”
Paige recalled the insouciance hiding
an underlying bitterness with which he’d first told her that when he was only a few months old his mother dumped him with an aunt who had several children of her own, while she traveled from the small country town of his birth to the city. She’d send the aunt a little money now and then, but she never came back, never sent for him. And after a while the money stopped.
When he was five the aunt had packed his belongings into a bag and told him a nice lady was coming to take him to a new mum and dad. He hadn’t understood what it meant. “I guess she’d had enough,” he said when Paige asked why. “She hadn’t asked to be saddled with an extra kid, she had enough on her hands with her own family, and I was probably a brat even then.”
He’d been hardly more than a baby, Paige had thought indignantly. The first foster home lasted until the couple started a family of their own. When the new baby arrived they asked the department to take Jager away.
“That was mean!” she’d exclaimed when he told her.
“They never promised to keep me forever.” He shrugged. “It wasn’t their fault I was too young to understand the concept of temporary foster care.”
She’d sensed his hurt at the third rejection in his then short life. No wonder his next foster parents had found him difficult to deal with and finally given up. As did several others.
By the time the department found a successful placement for him, he had lost the will for a real relationship with anyone, keeping his emotions guarded behind a wall of indifference.
Not that he’d ever said so. Paige had deduced a lot of what she knew about him from offhand, unguarded remarks rather than heart-to-heart confessional talks. Jager had never been big on verbal communication.
He’d been smart enough, she gathered, to see for himself eventually that making trouble didn’t get him anywhere. And that no one could look after him as well as he could himself.
Following skirmishes with teachers and a couple of minor brushes with the law as a teenager, involving underage drinking, illegal drag races and a couple of street fights, he’d left school and found a temporary job on a fishing trawler.
A couple more jobs followed before he’d gone south.
“To find your mother?” Paige had asked him.
He laughed. “Why?” he demanded derisively. “She doesn’t want me turning up on her doorstep. And I wouldn’t cross the street to give her the time of day.”
Work in the city wasn’t easy to find, and when he walked into a charity shop looking for secondhand clothing to replenish his meager wardrobe he’d had no job and no prospects.
Paige, in school uniform and with her shoulder-length hair in two neat pigtails, was serving behind the counter as she did twice a week. Her school catered to Auckland’s elite who could afford to pay its substantial fees, but the staff tried to instil a social conscience into their pupils. When an appeal was made for the girls to consider helping out at the nearby shop after school, she put up her hand.
Most of the volunteers were elderly, but the clientele varied from university students buying funky retro outfits to young parents saving on clothing that their children would grow out of within months, and older people obviously down on their luck.
Paige’s mother had wrinkled her nose at the idea. “Ugh! Dealing with other people’s used clothes and discarded pots and pans—you don’t know where they’ve been!”
“They’re cleaned before they go on sale,” Paige assured her.
“Still…” Margaret shuddered delicately, but hadn’t vetoed the idea. She herself was involved in a couple of charities, although her activities were confined to committee work and fund-raising.
Paige was fascinated by the people she met at the shop. And never more so than by the lean, darkly handsome young man who walked in one day and made for the racks of men’s clothing.
Earlier she’d noticed him peering into the window with an air of indecision, but when her glance collided with his he’d moved away.
She’d glimpsed black, slightly unkempt hair falling across a tanned forehead, a flash of startling green eyes under brooding black brows, making her blink behind her round, steel-rimmed glasses. His hands had been thrust into the front pockets of disreputable tight jeans.
Then she’d forgotten about him while she packed secondhand crockery, embroidered sheets, cooking utensils into a box for an excited young couple setting up house. “See ya,” the man said, hefting the box into his arms.
The girl, her face aglow, added, “We need lots more stuff for our place! We’ll be back.”
Paige smiled after them. One day she might be like them, in love and looking forward to a future with someone special, like the people in the secondhand romance novels that were among the most popular items in the shop, and which she sometimes took home to read.
An older staff member asked her to retrieve a large vase from the top shelf. Perched on a stepladder to hand the item down to the well-dressed, bargain-hunting matron who coveted it, Paige saw the young man again, just inside the doorway.
As she climbed down he cast a comprehensive gaze around the cramped shop before strolling toward the menswear section.
After steering a young family to a basket of swimwear, Paige deftly rescued a pile of odd saucers from the toddler’s inquisitive fingers, and presented him with a box of colored wooden cubes to keep him occupied while she helped an elderly customer compare price tags.
Back behind the counter, she saw the dark-haired young man looking through the clothing section.
Covertly she watched him push aside several hangers, pull a couple of shirts from the rail, put one back and go to the suits and trousers.
Paige walked over to him. “Can I help?”
He gave her the full force of those green eyes, reminding her of a cornered big cat, wary and ready to pounce if threatened.
Apparently deciding she was no threat, he flashed her a killer smile, and later she wondered if she’d fallen in love with him right there and then. It was enough to make any woman go weak at the knees. And Paige, young and inexperienced at sixteen but a woman all the same, was no exception.
“D’you think these’ll fit me?” he asked her, holding out front-pleated dark plum pants, and then glancing down at the shabby but clean jeans he was wearing.
She looked down too, and blushed as she realized where she was staring. “Don’t they have a size on them?” Assuming the most businesslike manner she could muster, she took the pants from him and inspected the faded label. “I think these are a thirty-four.”
“I don’t know what size I am,” he told her, “but the ones I’m wearing are too small.”
She could see that. They hugged him as if they’d been poured on, and the hems showed his ankles. “What size are they?”
“Dunno.” He looked across his shoulder, then turned his back to her. “Have a look?”
The jeans weren’t the only garment that was too small. His threadbare white T-shirt clung to his broad shoulders and outlined the muscles of his back all the way to the waistband of the jeans.
Hesitantly she slid a thumb into the band of the jeans and tried to peek at the label inside. He smelled of soap and faintly of male sweat. Surprisingly, she didn’t find it offensive.
“I can’t see it,” she said. Her cheek brushed against his warm, hard back and she jerked hastily away.
His hand went to the front of the jeans and she heard the snap open, the zip slide down a little. “Try now.”
This time she kept a few inches distance between them, and gingerly turned the band. “Thirty-two,” she informed him, trying to sound brisk and as if she wasn’t feeling odd little hot shivers down her spine. “Why don’t you try these on? There’s a fitting room at the back of the shop.”
He turned, and she sternly kept her gaze away from the unfastened front snap, the tantalizing inch or so of opening. “Do you think I need to?”
“It’s the only way to tell for sure.”
“I guess.” He held up the shirt he’d picked out. Gray and
hardly worn. It could almost have passed for new, but was half the price. “What do you think of this?”
What did she think? Paige blinked at him from behind her glasses. “I think you’ll look terrific in it.” He’d have looked terrific in anything. Didn’t he know that?
“Really?” The killer smile reappeared.
“Really.” She tried to sound firm and knowledgeable, like a real salesperson. “Why don’t you try this with it?”
She turned to the shelves, remembering a waistcoat she’d unpacked last week. The front was green silk with self-stripes, the back velvet, and she’d thought at the time how elegant it looked. It would show up his unusual eyes.
He looked at it dubiously, obviously a bit taken aback. “That?”
“This.” She draped it over his arm. “It might have been made for you.”
He laughed. “If you think that, I’ll try it.”
He was doing it to humor her, and she thought he had no intention of buying it.
But when he came out of the cubbyhole with its spotted wall mirror and tired orange curtain he placed all three items on the counter. “Okay,” he said. “But the waistcoat will cost me a meal.”
Not sure if he was joking, she looked anxiously at him, and saw he was smiling again. “For all three,” she said primly, “I’ll give you a discount.” She knocked fifty cents off the price, and later surreptitiously made it up out of her pocket money.
The following week she was crouched awkwardly in the small shop window, arranging some china that had just arrived, when she looked up and found him staring in at her.
She dropped a cup and had to scramble to rescue it before replacing it on the display stand. When she emerged from the window and made to negotiate the tricky deep step from the raised window to the floor, he was standing there, holding out his hand for her to grasp.
She took it, and he steadied her as she reached the floor. Somehow he was holding both her hands, looking down at her, and she pulled them away, feeling a bit breathless. “Thank you.”
“Did I give you a fright?” he asked.
“It’s all right. I hadn’t realized anyone was there.”