The One-Week Wife

by Hayley Gardner

  “Unfinished business with you, more like it,” Chantie said. “When are you going to admit you love him?”

  “When?” Gina echoed. Why hadn’t she gone home a half hour ago, so she wouldn’t have to deal with these questions?

  Because if he hadn’t left yet, going home meant Matt would be only yards away from her instead of a mile or two. Face reality, Gina, she told herself. Matt is really light-years out of your reach.

  “When?” Chantie repeated.

  Gina picked up her purse and strung it over her shoulder, killed another minute searching for her car keys and turned to Chantie. “Do you want an answer, or do you want a paycheck?”

  Chantie looked nonplussed. “You better figure it out, girl, before you lose the best thing that ever came into your life.”

  “Mac was the best thing,” she denied.

  “Mac might have made your eyes twinkle, but every time you talk about Matt, I see something special happening to you.”

  “Pray tell, what is that?”

  “Flushed cheeks, wide eyes, weak knees and a thoroughly dazed look. Mama called it the love fever.”

  “It’s obvious your mother should have been the relationship counselor, not I.” Gina turned around and headed for the front door.

  “Where are you going?” Chantie called.

  “Home,” Gina said over her shoulder. “If I do have this love fever over Matt, about the only thing I can do about it is go home, put my feet up, take a couple of aspirins and hope like all get out that it goes away.”

  That’s what she hoped, but when she arrived home and saw Matt’s car was still in his driveway, she knew there wouldn’t be enough aspirin in the world to cure what it was she had.

  10

  The clock chimed in the hallway, earning a sardonic look from Matt as he stared up at it, and then down at his still-unpacked suitcase. “Six o’clock, and all is…miserable?”

  Miserable was the only word that came close to describing how Matt felt Now that his father and he had reached a better understanding about things, he ought to be on the road to Virginia. Only, he couldn’t bring himself to leave. He was furious with Gina, but on the other hand, he had learned something from being forced to face his father. Something inside him was rebelling at leaving things as they stood with Gina. Was he thawing out? Feeling love? He didn’t know. It had been too damned long. How the hell was he supposed to tell?

  He took a deep breath. He’d been sitting in this same chair for what seemed like hours, knowing that if he stayed long enough, Gina would get home from her shop and be available if he wanted to go over there and confront her. But he couldn’t seem to work up the courage. He was trained to take care of the enemy, for God’s sake. How could one little slip of a woman be so threatening to him?

  Downstairs, someone knocked on the door. Matt hurried down the stairs, hoping it might be Gina and that somehow, someway, she might have his answer.

  I’ll never learn, Gina told herself, standing outside by her bushes with her hedge clippers, pretending an interest in her landscaping she didn’t have at the moment. Knowing Matt’s car was in the driveway, she’d been too restless to stay inside. When he left for good, the masochistic side of her wanted to see him drive away.

  So she’d changed into shorts and a T-shirt, picked up her hedge clippers and started trimming bushes that were becoming nubs by now, so she’d be aware when Matt came outside. When she heard what might be a knock on his door, she tried to see through the bushes, but all she got was a face full of small leaves.

  Backing away, she willed herself not to stoop so low as to look through the hole for a better view. She was obsessed Had she been one of her own clients in her counseling days, she’d have referred herself to a psychiatrist by now. Even knowing this, though, her feet refused to carry her back inside her own house. Neither could they take her next door so she could beg Matt to be in love with her. If he didn’t have it in him, he didn’t. Some things she’d finally learned she had absolutely no control over.

  A door slammed next door, and she heard Matt’s voice ask someone what they were up to. She couldn’t help herself. One last look at Matt, and that would be it forever. Hoping she didn’t look too obvious if someone noticed her from the street, she bent upside down and peered through the hole. Matt’s face was unreadable, but he was hurrying down the steps of his side porch.

  “Wait a minute, Frankie, I want to talk to you!” he yelled.

  Gina got the overwhelming sense of being thrown into the past, with everything in the same setup as it had been when she’d first met Matt. Excitement rushing through her veins, she caught her breath. Was this her chance to start all over again with him? Almost as quickly, she sobered. If it were, would she do one blasted thing differently?

  With the flash of a lightning bolt, she knew she would, and she knew what that thing was, too. Watching as Matt turned and ran down his drive, yelling again for Frankie to stop, Gina sprang into action. If he was going to be mad at someone, it should be at her.

  Slipping through the hole, she came up in Matt’s yard just as he reached the sidewalk at the far side of his property. She thought he would turn and come back because Frankie had obviously gotten away, but he yelled Frankie’s name again and started running down the street.

  Boy, she’d really done it—driven Matt over the edge into madness—chasing a kid down the street for nothing! Since there wasn’t time to get Frankie’s mother, Gina ran after the two of them, wondering how on earth she had let herself sink this far…She, Gina Delaney, was actually chasing a man, one she swore she had no feelings for. Chantie was going to die laughing.

  Elijah Tuttle was kneeling in his front yard when Frankie whizzed by on his bicycle, barely missing knocking over one of the potted flowers he was transplanting along the front sidewalk.

  “Danged kids,” he muttered under his breath.

  Seconds later Matt ran past him, too, shocking Tuttle so much he lost his balance and fell onto his backside. Staring at Matt’s figure as he continued to run, Tuttle added, “Danged kids.”

  Gina Delaney was the third one to run past, but she noticed him half-sprawled on the grass and stopped. Her face flushed, she panted heavily, then managed to say, “I saw that. Are you all right?”

  “Yeah, yeah,” he muttered, waving her on. Gina nodded and took off again down the sidewalk in a big hurry. He had just started to pick himself up when Jeb Tywall also strode past, intently staring far down the street in front of him.

  “Jeb! What’s goin’ on?”

  “Aim to find out. Can’t stop, or I might lose ‘em,” Jeb told him over his shoulder. “Watcha doin’ on the ground? C’mon with me,” he urged. “This might be real interestin’.”

  Tuttle rose to his feet. Frankie on a bike was usual. Matt Gallagher running after him would make for an afternoon of good gossip with the neighbors. But Jeb was right—that sweet Gina chasing after Gallagher was something to look into.

  Picking up his cane, Tuttle left his flowerpots and started down the street in their direction.

  As Frankie headed deeper into the woods, Matt swore with what little breath he had left over from running three blocks. The kid had started this by knocking on his door and then darting away, and this time, Matt was determined to find out what Frankie was really up to. It wasn’t something he had to know, of course. It was more like something he had to prove to himself—that he was right about the way he thought about things, about Frankie, and about his life. He wasn’t that harsh and unfeeling, it was just that the world really was rotten and he was just taking care of himself.

  On the far side of a tree, the boy scrambled off his bike and within seconds disappeared up into the lower depths of the branches. Stopping where he was a few feet away, Matt scowled when he saw where the kid was hiding.

  A tree house. Well, that explained why Frankie had taken his nails. Striding closer, he stopped when he saw the cardboard sign nailed into the side of the tree.

  He roun
ded to where he could read it, and when he did, for the second time in two days, he felt like someone had kicked him in the gut. It was his sign that he’d left by his screened-in porch, with some words scratched out and some words squeezed in wherever they would fit—but Matt got the picture clearly enough, misspellings and all.

  Mr. Galager’s Tree House.

  DO NOT DISTURB!

  Yes, this means you!

  “Frankie,” he called upward, watching the leaves shake as Frankie moved around up on the boarded floor, “I’m not certain I understand this.”

  Silence. And then the boy called down, “My brother and I made this fort for you, so you’d have some place private to go away from Miss Delaney.”

  Close enough now to see what was going on, and to hear what Frankie said from the tree, Gina stayed where she was out of sight and listened. As far as she could tell, Matt didn’t know he had an audience.

  Par for the course, she thought with a small grin.

  Matt half smiled upward at where Frankie was hidden behind the walls of his “fort.” “You thought I wanted my privacy from Gina?”

  “She’s a girl, isn’t she? And she’s always spying on you—I’ve seen her.”

  That was the last time she made cookies for that kid! Gina thought, almost blurting it out loud. But Matt was grinning up at the tree, and something about this scene taking place in front of her felt so good she couldn’t interrupt. Matt needed this in his life. He needed lots of people who cared—before he left to be alone again.

  “We just finished the fort today,” Frankie was saying. “So I came over to tell you, but you looked mad and you yelled before I said one word.”

  Matt sucked in his breath. There must have been something in his expression that frightened the kid when he’d opened the door at his house. Frankie sounded really upset. “I am so sorry, Frankie. Can I come up and see it?”

  “Are you going to hit me?”

  “No,” Matt promised forcefully, and then his face fell. Did the kids in the neighborhood think he was that bad?

  Gina could have hugged Matt—Frankie, too. Matt actually seemed worried about what the kids thought of him.

  “Okay, c’mon up,” Frankie called. “Mr. Tuttle said you’d be leaving town soon, so I guess it’s your last chance, anyway.”

  His last chance—at finding some kind of inner peace here, in Bedley Hills?

  “Frankie, you don’t know just how true that is,” Matt said. Reaching up, he climbed the ladder, caught onto a thick branch and shifted himself into the fort. He carefully tested the floor, which, thankfully, appeared sturdy enough. Sitting, he glanced at the job the Simmons boys had done.

  “Nice,” he told Frankie. “My brother and I couldn’t have done better at your age.” He said this with a smile, because he doubted he and West would have thought to put up the refrigerator-box-size pieces of thick cardboard as privacy walls.

  “We decorated it for you,” Frankie pointed out. In the corners were two spider plant seedlings and a couple of other items that had turned up missing in the neighborhood. Above Frankie’s head, three painted model airplanes swung from strings in the evening breeze. One was an F-15, just like he flew. Matt’s throat choked up, and then he saw, thumbtacked into one of the walls, the picture of him with his plane Frankie had taken along with the nails—and Matt’s heart. His eyes narrowed and watered, and he brushed at them impatiently. Allergies. Not tears, he told himself. But he knew better.

  “Your own private place,” Frankie added, still in the far corner, his face wary when he saw Matt’s expression. “Don’t you like it?”

  “Yeah, Frankie. I like this place a lot. Where’d you get the wood?”

  “Dad. I’ve been borrowing everything else to make it nice for you.”

  Matt shook his head, feeling so old, and so wise—yet at the same time, stupid. “Frankie, that’s not borrowing. That’s stealing.” He didn’t bother to add that he had done the same thing more than a couple of times to survive on the streets. “And stealing is very wrong, no matter how good the intention behind it.”

  “No, it isn’t stealing,” Frankie denied, shaking his head. “We were only keeping the things until you left town, and then we were going to return everything ‘cause we’re just boys, and we don’t need plants and stuff.”

  Matt had to swallow, and he couldn’t talk at first, which was all right, because he didn’t want to argue the point about the vandalism. If Frankie was a genius, he was certain the boy would give it some thought. “So you thought I needed a place to hide from Gina?”

  Frankie nodded solemnly. “She’s nice and all that, but she’s lonely for a husband, and you know how desperate lonely widows can be.”

  “Ha!” Gina said from below the tree. “I heard that, Frankie Simmons! Your mother is going to be furious that you’re spouting that nonsense about me!”

  “But, Ms. Delaney, Mom was the one who said it first!” Frankie yelled down through a gap in the boards.

  “Frankie Simmons, you just wait till I get you home!” Karen Simmons yelled up.

  “That was Mom!” Frankie said, sounding worried as he peered over the side and saw his mother among what had turned into a crowd around Gina. “Wow!” he said, sitting back. “Mr. Gallagher, the whole town is down there staring up at the tree house!”

  Matt dared a look. Maybe not the whole town, but at least eight people were down there—his landlord, Jeb Tywall, Frankie’s mother, who was tapping her foot, a few others he didn’t recognize, and Gina.

  She saw him and gave him a slow, tentative smile.

  “So much for privacy,” Frankie said from beside him.

  It took Matt a few seconds to realize that Frankie’s dry comment referred to the group of people who’d followed them and sounded exactly like him. He started laughing—long and loudly. And Frankie, grinning because he’d made a grown man laugh, laughed along with him.

  “I’m waiting, Frankie!” Karen Simmons called up again.

  “I gotta go.” Frankie started to slip over the side, but Matt stopped him.

  “Frankie?”

  The tousled-haired boy looked over his shoulder.

  “Thank you. This may be the sweetest thing anyone has ever done for me.” Matt swiped at his wet eyes. “Allergies,” he said when Frankie frowned again.

  “Oh. You’re welcome. You still gonna leave town?”

  That was a damned good question. “I don’t know. Could you send Miss Delaney up here, please?”

  “Aw, no! That was the whole point of the fort, to keep girls out!”

  “It’ll be fine, Frankie,” Matt said reassuringly, keeping his voice low. “I won’t let her trick me into anything, I promise.”

  “Okay,” he said disappointedly, “I’ll tell her to come up.”

  He climbed down, giving Matt a minute to think about the tears in his eyes and what he was going to do about Gina. Frankie had reminded him about caring in a major way.

  If he stuck with her, did Gina have just as much power to teach him about love?

  About a half minute later, Gina appeared in Frankie’s place. Holding the ladder, she stared around and frowned at him. “You aren’t planning on pushing me off the side, are you?” she asked.

  Matt patted the boards next to him, his face unreadable. Gina had heard the deep rumble of his laughter earlier and had hoped Matt could forgive her for interfering in his life. But the blank look on his face now told her that maybe she’d been jumping the gun wishing for that much.

  “Okay, okay,” she said, climbing over the edge of the floor and sitting down next to him. “I know you’re irritated with me—”

  “Hold on a minute.” Matt knelt and looked over the side of the far wall. What Gina and he had to say to each other was private. “The show’s over, folks. Frankie and his brother built a tree house and borrowed a few items for it from the neighborhood, which I’ll be returning shortly to the rightful owners. Nothing more to see.”

  Even Gina could he
ar the disappointed muttering below as the folks who had followed the chase from their homes started trickling away. Finally, when all she could hear was the chirping of some birds and the rustle of leaves, Matt sat back down and stared at her.

  The entire run over, except for when she’d spoken with Mr. Tuttle, Gina had been thinking about how much she wanted Matt in her life, and about why she’d been hiding from anything that faintly resembled love since Mac had died. When she looked back at Matt now, she realized why.

  Until now, she hadn’t found anyone who really needed her. All her life, except for Mac, she had been pushed out of the way at others’ convenience. Her parents had pretty much ignored her unless they were fighting and wanted her to take sides. Her dates didn’t seem to miss her when she wasn’t with them, and she’d been afraid she was going to get pushed aside when another person came along they did miss. Gina hadn’t found love because she wanted to be the fire in a man’s eyes, an overwhelming passion for him, the other half to his whole.

  Now, as she and Matt stared at each other, she finally knew what the intensity meant that was in his eyes every time he looked at her. He wanted her. And she wanted him. The feelings she had for Matt had always been unlike anything she’d ever known—strong and powerful. They made her heart pound and her body yearn for him. He was her passion. Was she his? If she was, could she convince him of that?

  “I make a stupid habit of trying to cure every ill I see, Matt, just so people will need me,” she said, her words coming in a rush. “I’m very sorry for interfering in your life—but deep inside, you needed your father, you just didn’t trust him. But he was a different man then. It’s been twenty years, Matt. Do you really think you’ll still be the exact same way you are now in twenty years? I hope like all get out you’ll be different. Kinder, wiser, less critical.”

  “Gina?”

  Her eyes widening, she shut her mouth.

  “I can’t say I appreciate the character assessment,” Matt said with a tiny grin, “but it’s okay about my father. Luke and I have made our peace.”