by Daphne Clair
“I’ll love you till I die.” Jager’s eyes glowed like green fire. “Is that what you want to hear?”
She didn’t, not if he didn’t mean it. And everything in his tone suggested he didn’t. Her throat felt raw. Her whole body was shaking. “No,” she managed to say again, scarcely more than a whisper. “Please go, Jager. Please.”
A half-dozen expressions chased across his face. Rage, and chagrin, disbelief, briefly shock, and—surely not despair? For a moment he looked at her with piercing concern, until she stiffened her shoulders and met his gaze steadily, willing him to leave before she broke down.
He made an abrupt gesture, took a step toward her, but she quickly moved back and he stopped.
“All right,” he said finally. “If that’s what you want.”
She didn’t deny it, and after a few seconds he walked slowly past her and out of the front door.
Paige waited until she heard the car roar away before she collapsed onto the couch with a hand over her eyes, shivering despite the warmth of the sun streaming in the window, and trying to blot out thought, emotion, memory.
Her mother phoned later in the day to discuss Maddie’s news. Margaret was ecstatic. Paige responded with as much enthusiasm as she could muster, but the events of the morning had left her feeling drained.
“And your father was quite impressed with Jager last night,” Margaret said when she’d run out of comments on the prospect of a grandchild. “He says that young man has matured considerably.”
“He is over thirty,” Paige reminded her.
“Yes, well, apparently he has a good brain, Henry says.”
“He always had a good brain.” Paige couldn’t seem to shake the habit of defending Jager.
“I suppose so,” Margaret admitted. “But his manner left much to be desired. And I don’t care what you say, you were too young to marry. He wasn’t right for you then.”
“I know, Mother,” Paige agreed wearily.
“But…well, looking back, perhaps we might have helped a little. We did what we thought best at the time.”
How ironic. Now, when it no longer made any difference, her parents were softening toward Jager. “It doesn’t matter now.”
Nothing mattered anymore.
She had to shake that feeling, Paige told herself in the following days. She got through them somehow, a matter of grim determination, getting out of bed, going through the motions of living and working, even eating regular meals, although nothing tasted as it should. It was like living in a thick, dreary fog; one that parted occasionally to give her glimpses of what real life was like, but she wasn’t a participant.
She hadn’t felt like this since the first few weeks after Aidan’s death, nearly a year ago now. But she’d got over that, she realized with faint shock. Jager had helped her get over it.
And in some ways this was worse. Aidan was beyond human reach and nothing would bring him back. Jager was no more than a phone call away. She had only to dial his number and say one word—yes—to have him in her life again. But it would come with a cost. The cost of knowing that she’d backed him into a corner, made him feel emotionally blackmailed; and he might never get over his anger and resentment.
Relieved when the weekend came and she didn’t need to drag herself to work and give an imitation of a living, breathing human being, she gave up trying to sleep in and tackled the garden instead. Already shrubs and perennials were flourishing, but weeds always threatened, and there was a warm, sheltered corner at the back of the house where she had decided to make a herb garden.
She was digging clods of earth and finding some satisfaction in chopping them with the sharp edge of the spade, when it was removed from her grasp and Jager said, “Here, let me do that.”
Sheer happiness dizzied her for a golden moment before all the problems that beset them tumbled back into place. “I was doing all right,” she said, wiping the back of a gloved hand over her damp forehead. Trust him to turn up when she was dirty and sweaty and in her oldest clothes, with not even her most minimal makeup on.
He glanced up, so briefly she had no time to see anything but the quick flash of his green eyes. “Sure,” he said. “But I’ll do it faster.”
And with less effort, she acknowledged, watching the movement of his muscles under a white T-shirt and blue jeans. That’s what he’d been wearing when she first saw him, but now the jeans had a designer label and the T-shirt wasn’t threadbare.
Paige sat down on the back step and pulled off the gloves. Why was he here? She was afraid to ask.
He worked with an easy rhythm, and finished in half the time it would have taken her.
“Enough?” he queried her.
“Yes.”
He lifted the spade and stuck it into the new garden bed, but stayed with his fingers curled around the handle, his eyes apparently studying the bare black earth. “I messed up the other night,” he said. “Big time.”
“Maybe we both did.” Paige clasped her hands on her knees. “I didn’t mean to make you feel trapped.”
He looked up then but she had the feeling he wasn’t really seeing her. “I suppose that’s part of it.”
“Part of it?”
“I was furious that you’d called my bluff.” His eyes focused on her now. “I thought I’d got the upper hand, had you just where I wanted you.”
Paige blinked. “You make it sound like a battle. What did you want, Jager, some kind of revenge?”
He altered his grip on the spade and looked down again, almost as though he planned to do more digging. “All I wanted was you. But I wanted—needed—to protect myself. I’d sworn I was never again going to descend to the hell you put me through when you left me, left our marriage. This time was going to be different. I was going to be in control. No vows, no promises to be broken. And if anybody dumped anybody, it was going to be me.”
“I know you were holding back. You said you’d given me yourself, but you never really opened up to me.” She asked with dull curiosity, “Did you plan to dump me?” It would have been a just revenge, she supposed.
“I tried not to plan at all, after the first time we slept together here in your bed. Before that…well, it was different then.”
“Different, how?”
“It wasn’t a coincidence, me being at your sister’s wedding. After my father contacted me I had no particular reason to see him again. But on that first visit he told me about my brother and asked if I’d like to meet him. I let him talk, though I wasn’t interested. Then he mentioned who Glen was marrying.” He paused. “Glen still thinks it was his own idea to invite me to the wedding.”
“You used him.”
“I used him to get invited here too.”
“Do you have any feelings for Glen, or your father?” she demanded.
He seemed to think about it. “Yes,” he said finally. “My father’s a good man who made a stupid, drunken mistake when he was young and is doing his best to make up for it. I respect him for that. Glen…he’s a friend. He’s a good guy, honest and caring and dependable. There aren’t too many like him. And his mother…” With an air of surprise he said, frowning, “I suppose I’ve grown fond of her. Finding out her husband had another child must have been hard, and she’s handled it with dignity and generosity.”
“Were you using me too?”
His eyes darkened. “Did it feel that way?”
“I felt more like a mistress than a lover,” she said.
“I didn’t think of it like that. All I knew was that I wanted you—had to have you.”
“In your bed? Mine?” she corrected.
“In my life, Paige. And it seemed to be working. When I finally got you to come to my place I felt you’d moved a step closer. You were with me, you wanted me, and I hadn’t had to expose my feelings at all, I was still able to pretend that my world wouldn’t end if you left me again. There were no more promises of undying love to be flung back in my face.”
“No commitment,” Paig
e murmured.
“And then you whipped the rug from under my feet. It hadn’t occurred to me—stupidly—that all you had to do was threaten to leave me to have me fold like a melting jelly. I suppose I never thought you’d do it. When you did, I felt…helpless.”
“You?” She swept an ironic gaze over him, from the six-foot-plus top of his head over the arrogant nose and iron jaw, the rock-hard muscles of his chest and arms, and right down to his size twelve feet.
“I didn’t like the feeling,” he said. “I lashed out. I’m sorry.”
Paige didn’t know what to say. The silence grew, and Jager put a foot on the spade, then lifted it off again. He finally let go his grip on the handle and took a step toward her. “I’ll promise anything,” he said, “do anything, to have you back, Paige. If marriage is what you want, you have it. I didn’t mean those things I said.” He shook his head impatiently, then went down on his haunches in front of her, taking her hands in his. “Or I should say, I did mean them, but not the way I said them.”
“You said you loved me,” she reminded him, looking down at their joined hands.
“And that I always will. It’s true. I can’t help it, and I warn you that if you walk out on me again you won’t get away so easily. I’ll be doing my damndest to bring you back.”
“You said you loved me the first time you saw me.”
He rubbed his thumb over the back of one of her hands. “A slight exaggeration, maybe. I was attracted to you. I wasn’t sure why, because you weren’t my usual type.”
“I wasn’t pretty.”
“Pretty!” He dismissed that with a scornful jerk of his head, as if the word were “trash” or “trivia.” “You had more than prettiness. Elegance. Class. I liked that about you from the start.”
“Inner beauty?” she inquired, resignedly. How often had her mother reminded her it was more important than being pretty to look at?
“No!” Jager said. “Yes, that too, I guess. But not only that.” He gave her a puzzled look. “Paige…you surely don’t think you’re ugly?”
“Not ugly. Just plain.”
“You’re not plain!” He shifted his hands to her shoulders and gave her a little shake. “Not that it matters, but you are going to be a beautiful old lady when all the pretty girls have lost their looks. Yours is the kind of beauty that lasts, that gets better with age. I’ve told you often enough, you’re lovely!”
“I thought you were just being…kind.”
The shocked disbelief in his eyes convinced her. Jager really did think she was beautiful! And although she knew it wasn’t really important, she couldn’t help a thrill of delight. If Jager believed it, even if he were deluded, who cared what the rest of the world thought?
It was a liberating thought. For the first time she believed he meant it. And if he really did love her…
She said, “I don’t want you to feel pressured into marriage. If you like we can go on just as we are.” He had made some revelations today that helped her understand him much better than before, in fact he’d come right out and told her how he felt. Such a giant step, for the first time she could hope their relationship might become permanent. That this time they would make it.
He leaned over and kissed her lips, gently. “I need you, Paige, my first and only love, and I don’t care what I have to do to make you need me.”
“You don’t have to do anything.” Nothing he could do could make her need him any more than she did.
His eyes searched her face. “Glen asked me to be godfather to his baby,” he said. “It made me think for the first time about what having a baby means.”
The question had hardly arisen when they were married. They’d known they were too young, and financially they couldn’t possibly have coped. “A baby?” Paige whispered.
“I never wanted to be a father before,” Jager said. “Until I saw his—my father’s—family, and then Glen and Maddie, I didn’t believe people who said love expands to new people. It had never happened to me. But with those two—you can see it growing daily. They’re more in love than ever. It’s…awesome.”
“You’ve been seeing them?” Paige felt slightly guilty. She’d spoken to Maddie a couple of times on the phone but she hadn’t wanted to see anyone, hugging her hurt and pain to herself on the excuse that she didn’t want to cloud Maddie’s happiness with her own misery.
“I needed to talk to Maddie about you. I figured she knew you better than anyone.”
“She never said.”
“Because I asked her not to. My pride had taken enough of a beating without you knowing I was begging your sister to tell me what to do to get you back.”
“What did she say?”
“She said, ‘Be honest with her. And tell her you’re sorry.’ I’m being as honest as I can, Paige. And I’m asking you to forgive me. Can you?”
She loved him, and she was beginning to think that he truly loved her, despite her misgivings and his previous defensive attitude.
He’d been afraid of being hurt again. His mother had left him, then his aunt discarded him, and several foster homes had sent him away. All he’d known as a child was abandonment and betrayal. And when he thought he’d found his one true love and married her to prove that he was faithful and steadfast, she too had betrayed him, run away and repeated the cruel cycle.
“Can you forgive me?” she asked him. “For leaving you?” Because she knew he never had.
“You were barely more than a child,” he said. “I asked too much of you. And your parents deliberately made it harder.”
“My mother apologized for that, sort of, the other day.”
He hesitated. “You always said they did it out of love.”
“And you never believed that.”
“It’s an exclusive love,” he said. “The kind that shuts out anyone who threatens what they want for you.”
“Isn’t that…?”
“Love of a kind,” he conceded. “But did they care that they were hurting you? I won’t do that to any child of mine. They wanted you to live the life they’d mapped out for you, not the one you wanted for yourself.”
“I suppose,” Paige acknowledged, “there’s some truth in that. They could have been less…rigid. I hope I would be, that I’d support my children even when they made mistakes.”
He stood up, taking her with him, so they stood face-to-face, as equals, even though he was taller. “Marry me again,” he said quietly. “Bear my children, and love me all the days of my life, as I love you?”
It sounded like a solemn vow. She met his eyes. “If that’s what you truly want.”
“More than anything in the world. Ever since you left me I’ve been working toward this moment without knowing it. All my success, all the money I made, that fancy apartment I bought, was just to impress you.”
“Oh, Jager!” she said, and almost apologetically, “I’m not impressed by that, you know.”
Chagrin warred with his reluctant recognition of the truth. “I know,” he confessed. “It doesn’t mean anything to you, but it does to me.”
“If it makes you happy,” she said. “But if you lost it all tomorrow I’d still stick by you. Please believe that. I’m not seventeen and scared of real life anymore.”
“I believe it, but it won’t happen. I may not be as rich as Aidan, but—”
“Aidan wasn’t rich!”
“Not by your father’s standards, maybe—”
“Not by anyone’s standards. He had a good job as an industrial chemist, but our home was mortgaged and…well, we weren’t poor but we budgeted quite carefully. It was only with his insurance that I was able to buy this place.”
He frowned down at her. “I assumed…”
“Wrong. But I suppose I can forgive you for that too. I’ve forgiven everything else.”
“Everything?”
“Everything.”
“So?”
She realized what he was waiting for. “Yes,” she said. “I’ll marry you.�
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He pulled her close and muttered into her hair, “Thank you, darling, thank you!” Then he said, “It’s a bit premature, but…”
And suddenly she was swung into his arms and carried through across the worn back doorstep, through the doorway and along the passageway to the bedroom.
“I’ll miss this room,” he said, depositing her on the bed and beginning to shuck his clothes.
“Miss it?” She watched him pull off the T-shirt, them, enjoying what he revealed.
“When we’re married again.” He unzipped his jeans and dropped them. Catching her inquiring look, he said, “You are going to live with me, aren’t you?”
She sat up, and he perched on the bed and began to undress her too. Paige didn’t stop him, lifting her arms to help him pull off her shirt, but said, “And give up the cottage?”
He undid her bra and tossed it aside. It landed on the leopard’s ear and dangled. “I know you put a lot of work into it. We did.”
“Then why can’t we live here?”
Jager was looking rather greedily at her breasts, even as he unfastened her trousers and eased them down her legs. She didn’t think he was listening. “Jager?” she insisted.
He pulled off the jeans and pushed her gently against the pillows, laying a hand on her breast as he kissed her, then lifted his head. “Don’t you like the apartment? We can get another. Or a house. We’ll need a house when the children arrive.” He glanced down at what his hand was doing to her and smiled with satisfaction. “I’ll find an architect—”
“Jager!” She gasped and wriggled, but held firm to her purpose. And his wrist. “I don’t want to sell the cottage. Not yet anyway.”
His hand finally stilled where it was. She said, “Why can’t we live here?”
“Business,” he said. “Entertaining. Besides…”
“Besides what?” she asked, and when he looked away, shrugging, she added fiercely, “Don’t you dare clam up on me now! If I’m going to marry you I want to know what you’re feeling.”
“If?” he queried, his eyes narrowing.