The Heart of the Matter

by Muriel Jensen

  Someone, she noticed, had placed a beaten egg in front of Sergei’s carrier, and he was lapping it up greedily.

  Jason carried what looked like a fresh pot of coffee to the table and winked at her as Patsy rose effusively to introduce her to her companion.

  “Laura,” she said, giving her a hug, “I’d like you to meet my husband, Ben. Ben, this is Laura, Jason’s friend.”

  Ben got to his feet and offered his hand. Jason caught her eye and grinned.

  Ben was tall and big and seemed to have a friendly nature that matched his size. He pulled out a chair for Laura.

  “I hear you’ve got the big guy here off of ribs and pizza and bacon burgers,” he said when they were all seated again. “Do you walk on water, too?”

  She laughed. “If it’s Perrier,” she said, and held her cup out as Jason poured coffee.

  Ben guffawed. “Quick as you are, too, Jase. I don’t know. I think you’re in trouble.”

  “Yeah,” Jason replied with a lingering look at her that did nothing to hide what he was thinking from anyone. “Me, too.”

  Laura saw Patsy and Ben exchange a look, then scolded Jason with her own.

  “What are the boys all excited about?” she asked, trying to divert any discussion of their relationship as a subject. Mostly because it didn’t seem wise to talk about it when she wasn’t sure she understood it herself. “There seems to be frantic activity going on in their rooms.”

  “They’re packing,” Jason replied. “Patsy and Ben are on Lake Winnipesaukee with their boat for a few days, and they thought the boys might want to spend some time with them. It’s only about thirty miles from here.”

  “But…Matt?”

  “He’ll be fine,” Patsy assured her. “Ben and I are old hands at this. We won’t let anything happen to him.” She smiled at her with a fondness that was very sisterly. “Jason told us how good you are with the boys. And that they’re crazy about you. Matt, particularly.”

  Laura nodded, fighting back a rush of color into her cheeks. They knew. She was sure they knew. Jason probably told them. “Well, I fell in love…with them myself.”

  It was a regrettable choice of words for someone trying to be secretive about her relationship, and she closed her eyes the moment the words were out of her mouth.

  Patsy smiled innocently. “With all the Warfields?”

  There was a little shuffle under the table. Ben, she guessed, had kicked Patsy. Patsy seemed not to notice and waited for an answer.

  All right. Laura sighed and met Patsy’s gaze. “Yes. With all the Warfields.”

  Patsy punched both arms into the air. “Yes!” she cried triumphantly. “Hallelujah!”

  Jason, calmly drinking his coffee, turned to Ben, who watched his wife with a shake of his head. “Didn’t I tell you to volunteer her for the space program?”

  “They turned me down,” Ben reported dispassionately. “Seems they already have too many monkeys.”

  Patsy ignored him and leaned toward Laura. “I know it’s all just beginning for the two of you and that it’s absolutely none of my business, but the very moment you decide you want to make it permanent, let us know. We want to do your wedding!”

  “Pat, for God’s sake…” Ben pleaded.

  “Ah…” Laura began.

  “I know, I know,” Patsy said, forestalling her by raising both hands. “You’re not even close to that stage yet, but when you are, we have the most beautiful garden in Lawrence. And it’s warm enough for it all the way to early October. And we have a maple tree that’ll be turning color…”

  Patsy’s planning was mercifully cut short by the arrival of the boys. Adam was carrying Mathew and his crutches, and Eric had three bags. The dog followed, plumed tail wagging.

  Laura turned to Ben. “Do you have life jackets for all of them?”

  He studied her a moment, then smiled. Laura thought his expression seemed decidedly tolerant and familial. “Yes, we do. I promise you we’ll take excellent care of them. Do you think I want to answer to him?” He jerked a thumb in Jason’s direction.

  Jason simply smiled at her indulgently, his expression suggesting that he was well acquainted with the parenting skills of his sister and brother-in-law and that her concerns were groundless.

  Laura began to apologize, but Ben stopped her. “I understand. And I’ll bet that at heart you’re more worried about what the boys could do to us.”

  Adam came up beside his uncle. “We were planning not to hurt you, Unc,” he said, patting him on the back. “But if we have to stand around here and listen to all of you talk, we’re going to spill the story about how you caught that girl’s underwear with a Royal Coachman fly last time when we went fishing and Aunt Patsy stayed home.”

  “What?” Patsy demanded flatly, pushing away from the table.

  Ben rose also. “She wasn’t wearing them at the time,” he explained quickly. “Her bag had fallen overboard and I happened to have a line in the water and brought up a rather impressive…er…”

  “Bra,” Eric said helpfully.

  Ben cast him a look, then smiled at Adam. “Say your goodbyes, we’re on our way. And any hope you might have had of conning me into letting you watch ‘American Gladiators’ tonight just went south.”

  The boys hugged Jason goodbye and listened patiently to all the usual parental precautions. Adam paused to hug Laura and the other boys followed suit. Then they headed for the door. Eric could be heard asking Adam, “Went south? What does that mean?”

  “I think it means gone.”

  “It isn’t our fault he caught a bra.”

  “No, but it’s your fault that everybody knows about it.”

  “You said.”

  “Shut up.”

  The door slammed behind them, and Jason burst into laughter, patting Ben on the shoulder. “You didn’t really think you could get them to keep a secret, did you?”

  “Yes, I did,” he returned with feigned indignation. “It cost me five pounds of beef jerky and thirty yards of red licorice.”

  “I want to know what happened to the bra?” Patsy asked as they all walked to the door.

  “I returned it like the gentleman that I am.”

  Patsy rolled her eyes. “You finally catch something I might like and you give it back?”

  He hooked an arm around her shoulders and kissed her temple. “You couldn’t have filled it, sweetie,” he said. He pulled the door open for her and hid behind it just in time to miss the swing of her purse.

  Patsy hooked an arm in Laura’s as they walked to the car. “Try to get Jason to relax while we’re gone. He always takes these working vacations. And he hasn’t had much of a personal life since Lucy died.”

  “I will,” Laura promised. “He’s eating right and he has a NordicTrac here that he’s been working on faithfully every morning.”

  Laura stopped at the car door and nodded. The boys waved from the back seat. “That’s good, but there’s more inside him than a digestive tract,” Patsy said. “He’s a wonderful man, Laura. And he hasn’t wallowed in his loss, but he and Lucy were so good together, I know he thought it would be futile to even hope to find that again. So he lived for the boys and for his work, but not for himself.” She smiled and hugged her. “And yet, here you are. And he looks as though he’s come to life again.”

  Laura didn’t try to deny anything. “I feel,” she admitted quietly, “as though I’ve come to life.”

  The men joined them, Ben and Patsy got into the station wagon, and Jason had to hold Buttercup’s collar to prevent him from trying to join them. He barked in protest as Ben pulled away. Everyone waved from the open windows. Jason and Laura waved until they turned toward the main road and disappeared from sight.

  Jason turned to Laura, cupped her head in his hand and kissed her until she was breathless. “I’m taking you back to bed,” he said, catching her hand and leading the way back to the house. The dog followed dispiritedly.

  “No,” Laura said, hurrying to k
eep up with Jason.

  He stopped in his tracks, then pulled her back when her momentum shot her past him. His eyes were troubled. “No? You’re having…morning-after remorse?”

  “No.” She slapped his chest. “No. I…” She stopped abruptly and frowned at him. “Why? Are you?”

  “Of course not. But why don’t you want to go back to bed?”

  She spread her arms to encompass the beautiful day with its brilliant blue sky, with sunlight slanting through the trees and the crystal water of the lake embroidered with it.

  “Look at this day! You spend so much time staring at a computer monitor that you forget what the outside world is like. In another few weeks, it’ll be getting too cold for hiking, so we should take advantage of today. And Buttercup would like a walk, wouldn’t you, boy?”

  He gave one loud woof that had an affirmative sound.

  “Hiking,” he repeated. “As in walking a long distance, or in football parlance?”

  She laughed. “I don’t know a touchdown from a hoedown. Does that give you a clue?”

  He ran a hand over his face. “Laura,” he said reasonably, “my children are gone for forty-eight hours! I can eat without anybody wanting some of what I’ve got, I can watch TV without anyone wanting to watch something else, I can make love to my woman without fear of interruption. Why would I want to go hiking?”

  She wrapped her arms around his neck and bit his bottom lip. “Because that’s where your woman is going to be.”

  He groaned and leaned into her. “I’ll get my boots. But we’re not talking camping out, are we?”

  She smiled eagerly. “Do you have the gear?”

  “No,” he said quickly. “Well, the boys have a tent they put up in the back sometimes, but we don’t have a stove or powdered food or anything like that.”

  She shook her head at him pityingly. “You don’t need a stove to cook outside. The pioneers didn’t have stoves. They built fires. And they didn’t have powdered food, either. They caught fish and shot game.”

  “Okay, you’re getting into the realm of fantasy here,” he warned, folding his arms to express the firmness of his stance, though she still had her arms around his neck. “I am not killing anything, particularly if I would then be expected to autopsy it and cook it.”

  She kissed him and grinned. “How you do carry on. Actually, I was thinking of a frying pan and a couple of lean hamburgers, but maybe we could just make sandwiches. And we can be back by late afternoon. There’s a trail around the lake. The boys told me about it. Think you could handle that without going over the edge?”

  “And then we make love?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “All right. I’m in.”

  “I’ll lead the way,” Laura said, pointing up the trail that began about an eighth of a mile from Jason’s back door. “Keep me in sight. If I get too far ahead, stop me.”

  She wore shorts, T-shirt and a sweatshirt knotted around her waist by the sleeves. Her boot socks were pulled up almost to her knees, and her clunky boots looked enormous against her trim, bare legs, and yet somehow very sexy. Her hair was caught back in a ponytail.

  “Okay?” she asked.

  “No,” he said, feeling light-hearted and free. And it wasn’t just freedom from the responsibility of children. It was freedom from the shadow of the last few years. He was determined to tease the woman responsible for that freedom. “I know this is your area of expertise and everything, but why do you have to lead? I’m bigger. I’ll lead.”

  “It’s traditional in hiking,” she explained patiently and with a certain patronizing tone he mistrusted, “that the smallest member of the party leads. That way the pace is set by the one who would have the most difficulty keeping up.”

  That was reasonable, but it still impugned his status as the male. “Well, what if a bear jumps out at you?”

  “I’ll happily step aside and let you reason with him. No doubt he reads your column, too, and would be completely charmed by you. Shall we go?”

  “God,” he grumbled as he followed her and Buttercup into the trees. “Put hiking boots on you and you develop a real attitude. I’m glad I found out about it before asking Patsy to plan our wedding.”

  “Oh, no,” she called over her shoulder with theatrical regret. “Is the wedding off?”

  “Of course not,” he replied. “The most satisfying way to pay you back would be to make you marry me and help me raise my kids.”

  The trail widened, and she stood aside laughing until he caught up with her, then she hooked her arm in his and rubbed her cheek against his shoulder.

  He thought he could get used to this kind of hiking.

  When they were forced to hike single file, Buttercup took the lead and Laura assumed a no-nonsense approach to the trail. Jason watched her sweatshirt flap against her beautifully shaped and muscled backside in her khaki shorts, the muscles in her boot sock-covered calves bunching and stretching as they climbed a small grade. Her ponytail swung from side to side in a manner he found completely erotic.

  He kept up easily, working up only a light sweat but a considerable appetite by the time they reached the halfway mark and stopped for lunch.

  There was a small clearing in the pines on the lake side of the road, and they sat on their sweatshirts and pulled the sandwiches out of the pack Jason carried. Laura fed the dog from her sandwich.

  Jason took a bite, chewed and hesitated a moment over the unfamiliar taste. He finished chewing, swallowed, and asked Laura curiously, “Peanut butter and.?”

  “Pickle,” she replied, as though that were a normal combination. At his raised eyebrow, she asked in surprise, “You don’t like it? I didn’t want to make sandwiches that might spoil, and peanut butter and jelly is so.juvenile.”

  He had to smile at that. “You’re telling me peanut butter and pickle is chic?”

  “I like it,” she replied defensively. “Buttercup likes it.”

  “Well, then, I’m sure it’ll be showing up on the menu at the Four Seasons any time now.”

  Laura saw the amusement behind Jason’s swift reply and couldn’t remember when she’d been happier in her entire life. And it was all because of him.

  “Seems hiking boots have given you a bit of an attitude, too,” she said. “I’ve never known you to complain about food of any kind.”

  “It wasn’t a complaint, it was a question,” he corrected her after chewing and swallowing another bite. “And I do like it.”

  She leaned toward him, almost close enough to reach him with a kiss, and asked, “Then why the fuss?”

  “It wasn’t a fuss, it was a question.”

  “Then why the question?”

  He leaned toward her, closing the millimeter of space that separated them. And he did kiss her. “Because I love the serious look you get when you feel like you have to justify yourself.”

  “I wasn’t aware,” she challenged, “that I ever try to justify myself.”

  “You do it all the time,” he disputed. “When you used to try to convince me that you didn’t want to have a relationship, then when you knew you couldn’t fight it and you tried to use the excuse that you didn’t think you could be a mother, then when you tried to apologize to Ben for acting just like one.”

  She wasn’t sure how to respond to that. He was right. She was always trying to explain her position on things, mostly because she was always sure no one would understand why she reacted the way she did. Because she didn’t. She’d come to terms with the loss of her father’s fickle affections and the wayward habits of the men she’d dated, yet every time it came to laying her emotions on the line again, all the old protective instincts began piecing the wall together.

  She prepared to defend herself. “And you find that annoying.”

  He smiled and kissed her again. She found she had no defense against that. “I find it charming. Just like all the rest of you. You don’t have to justify anything to me. Whatever’s a part of you I accept as part of me.”
>
  She studied him in amazement, saw the complete sincerity in his eyes and sighed in surrender. “You’re not from here, are you?”

  He narrowed an eye in puzzlement. “Here?”

  “This planet. This breed of man.”

  “Sure I am,” he replied gravely. Then he added with a wicked grin, “Want to inspect me?”

  They walked hand in hand after lunch for a long stretch, the dog blazing the trail, then had to go single file again on the far end of Jason’s side of the lake.

  By midafternoon they put on their sweatshirts and got home just as the sun began to set. Jason dropped his pack on the porch, and Buttercup settled down beside it with a weary thump. Jason walked Laura to the end of the pier where they sat, feet dangling just above the water, and watched the sky turn from brilliant orange through a range of shades of pink and purple until the sky over the trees was lavender and the North Star shone like some divine promise.

  Laura hooked an arm around Jason’s shoulder and leaned her head on it. “Thank you for a beautiful day,” she said. “Thank you for making me this happy.”

  “I thought you had done it,” he said, resting his head on hers. He raised his hand to her cheek. “I love you, Laura.”

  She turned her lips into his hand and kissed his palm. “I love you, Jason. Now,” she said, getting to her feet and offering him a hand up, “we can go to bed.”

  They made love for hours, got up again at midnight to stuff themselves on shrimp and strawberries and wine while watching Mogambo. Jason lured Sergei out of the carrier with a shrimp. The cat followed him to get a second one, but evaded Jason’s hand when he reached out to pet him and ran back to the carrier.

  Jason and Laura went back to bed, made love again and slept until midmorning.

  Jason’s agent called while they ate cereal on the front porch, and Laura went inside to make more coffee.

  “Barclay Books loves your proposal for a book about bringing romance into your life.” Louie Moss was almost a cliché where the public’s image of agents was concerned. He was short, rotund and bald, and never spoke without a cigar clamped in his teeth, the Surgeon General’s warnings notwithstanding.