Maybe This Time (A Second Chance Romance)

by Susan B. James

  Jen set her spoon down. “Why don’t we call your father? He can fix it.”

  Kathryn’s eyes lit up. “Yes. I want to see my dad.”

  Lance took out his wallet and handed Kathryn two one-pound coins. “Go back to the game room and see if you can beat my score at Double Dragon.”

  “That means you want to talk without me hearing.” Kathryn spooned up the last of her sundae and slid out of the booth. “Don’t fight. Please.”

  Lance watched her go. He took a deep breath, exhaled, and turned back to Jen.

  Jen recoiled. “You’ve got that ‘I am a calm space in a moment of disaster’ look in your eyes.”

  “Jen, Jeremy will invent the machine, but as of today, it hasn’t been invented. I will . . . we will call Jeremy, but I’m not sure what he can do.”

  Jen took a deep breath of her own and held it for a count of ten. She really, really wanted to punch something. “You’re one of the big brain computer men. Can’t you fix it?”

  “No.”

  She could feel Lance’s tension. He was waiting for the explosion.

  “Do you want a drink?” he asked warily.

  “Yes. I would also like a pack of cigarettes and possibly, some weed. But I don’t do those anymore.”

  Lance stared at her.

  She shrugged. “I wouldn’t say no to a Xanax.”

  “How long?”

  “Have I been sober? Since the twentieth of May, 1980.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  Why? He’d divorced her because he’d assumed she’d deliberately aborted their child. She’d never forgiven him for believing that. She didn’t owe him the truth. “The twelve steps say to make amends where possible.” The old familiar wound sliced her open. “I couldn’t bring the baby back, so what was the point?”

  He winced.

  She saw the reflection of her pain in his eyes.

  “I never ask Jeremy about you. I didn’t know. I see your name in the papers when you’re doing a play.” His smile cracked. “So how is sober life?”

  “Hard, at first. But worth it. You, of course, never succumbed to any temptation.”

  “Yes. Yes, I did. I married you.”

  Chapter 4

  There was no answer to that. Marrying her was his biggest temptation? Really? Why did it feel like a put-down? Maybe it was the look in his eyes.

  “I won.” Kathryn slipped onto the padded bench next to Lance. “Are we going home now?”

  If only they could. “Yes. We are going back to your house and I’m going to spend the night in my old room, and tomorrow we’ll figure out how to fix this shambles.”

  The ride back to Jeremy’s townhouse was silent. Kathryn stared out the window, tapping her fingers to a rhythm only she could hear.

  Lance was lost in thought. Nothing odd about that. Their marriage had been filled with those kinds of abstractions. They used to drive her crazy.

  But it wasn’t like her to be silent. She always had something to say. Her AA sponsor, Jeanette, told her she used words to build a wall between herself and her feelings. She’d told Jeanette she was full of it. But she might have had a point.

  When they got back to the house Jen shooed Kathryn upstairs to wash her hands. Once she was out of earshot, she turned to Lance. “What are we going to do?”

  “Worst case scenario, you get to spend the next ten years with an exact double and Kathryn has a twin sister,” Lance joked.

  Jen shuddered. “No way am I doing ten years with my old me. It was hard enough getting to who I am now. I don’t want to see me go through it again.”

  “I washed my hands.” Kathryn hopped down the stairs, two at a time. “Is there anything to eat?”

  Biscuits and milk had been part of Kathryn’s bedtime ritual.

  “Let’s adjourn to the kitchen. Mrs. Flannery said there were Ginger Gems.”

  Lance held the door for them.

  You could always count on Lance for courtly gestures. “Thank you, Lancelot,” she murmured dulcetly.

  He glowered at her. Then grinned. “You’re welcome, Guinevere.”

  Lance put on the kettle for tea. By unspoken consent, they called a truce until Kathryn took her biscuits and milk up to her bedroom.

  Lance stirred his tea absentmindedly. “Do you know why Jeremy was working on time travel?”

  “I haven’t the faintest. He’d talk to me about anything but his work.” Jen bit into a Ginger Gem. “I suppose he thought time travel was better than bombs. After Rob was killed he said he was never going to let someone use his research again to make a better weapon.”

  Lance’s face shadowed. “Everything changed when Rob died. Your parents aged a decade overnight. When Jeremy walked away from pursuing physics research and took up managing your father’s news magazine−”

  “If you could call what he wrote news. Do you remember the headline Goldfish Has Churchill’s Face?”

  Lance grinned. “My personal favorite was Queen Victoria Reincarnated as Mouse.”

  “It wouldn’t have been if you’d ever met my great aunt and her dratted mouse. She’d reverted to her memories of her time as Lady-in-Waiting to Queen V and insisted her mouse was the Queen. I remember when she called Jeremy in to interview it.”

  “Jeremy told me about that. He took his girlfriend Sherry to the interview.”

  Jen stiffened. “Sherry. You have no idea how I hate that woman. She appeared out of nowhere one day, and Jeremy fell so hard you could have heard it all the way to Sussex. And then she disappeared. Back to America without a word. She broke his heart. He was never the same after that. He quit the magazine, hired a managing editor, and said he had an idea for a new invention. He never said what the invention was going to do.”

  Lance steepled his fingers. “Sherry came from the future.”

  Jen’s mouth dropped open. Was he joking? No. He looked dead serious. “Normally I would say, tell me another, but given what happened today, I have to believe you.”

  “Jeremy visited Sherry’s future with her, so he knew time travel was possible. He told me she’d planned to come back to him. When she didn’t, he started looking for a way to go to her.

  Trust her brother to do things the hard way. “Why didn’t he just go to America and find her?”

  “Because it’s not that simple.”

  He was closing off. Giving her his you wouldn’t understand look. God, how she hated it. “Why don’t you try to break it into tiny bits for me? Simple ideas a person with my acorn-sized brain can comprehend.”

  Lance blinked. “Sorry. I’m not used to talking about this.”

  “Or anything else for that matter,” Jen sniped. She was instantly sorry for it. He looked the way he had when Jeremy first brought him home from school for the holidays. Unbearably lonely. “Sorry. Please go on.”

  Lance’s eyes focused on his steepled hands. “I didn’t believe him at first. But when I started doing research, I found it was possible. Theorists believed could be done if you got the physics right. But time theory is a very tricky thing. There are a number of hypotheses about what could happen if one time traveled. One theory is, if we do travel back in time, we set up an infinite number of probabilities. Think of them as alternate dimensions.”

  Jen’s heart stuttered. “So in theory, I could have a do-over. I could go back to—”

  “To when you married me and marry someone else instead. Perhaps live happily ever after with six children and a dog.”

  “One child would have been quite enough for me, thank you.”

  “So did you?”

  “Did I what?”

  “Marry. It’s been eight years for me since we divorced. For you, it’s been twenty-one years. Did you remarry? Have a child?
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br />   He almost looked like he cared. What would happen if she kissed him? Jen pushed her cup away. No! She never wanted to love anyone again the way she’d once loved Lance. It almost killed her. “Yes, I married again. In 1992, to Lord Peter Bromley. I divorced him in 1993. No children. Strike two. Go on.”

  Lance nodded, his face expressionless. “Another theory is time protection. For instance, if you decided to go back and change history so our child would be born, time itself would prevent it.”

  The knife again. “What makes you think I would want to bring him back?”

  Lance’s eyes widened. “Him? It was a he? How could they tell so early?”

  Jen curled her fingers around the edge of the table, wishing it were his neck. She pushed herself up from her chair. “You are a real shit. You know that, right? Goodnight.”

  Chapter 5

  Jen held the storm inside till she reached the comfort of her room. How did she know it was a boy? Where was Lance when she’d needed him? Her mind replayed the scenes burned into her memory.

  The Taming of the Shrew’s Australian tour was a triumph. She’d been feeling wonky at the beginning, but it had been getting better. Only two weeks left on the tour. When she got home, she and Lance could announce the happy event to the family. And she would quit acting till the baby was born. Maybe quit altogether, at least until their child was of school age. That would make Lance happy.

  Or would it? Maybe he wanted the stinging note she left him when she took off on the tour to be the end of them. She’d gotten over her mad and mailed him a funny postcard saying sorry. Whatever rotten thing she’d said in her note, he should have known she didn’t mean it. She was a captive of pregnancy hormones. Weren’t pregnant women supposed to get a book of free passes?

  It had been more than a month since she’d mailed her sorry card and she still hadn’t heard from him. Typical Lance, yet again refusing to talk to her because she had feelings.

  She remembered yelling at him, “Don’t I have the right to be scared? What am I going to do with a baby? What kind of mother will I make? I’m great at acting, but I don’t have a homemaking gene in my body!”

  All she’d wanted was Lance’s reassurance. She wanted him to tell her everything would be all right. She wanted him to pull her into his lap the way he used to do when she’d burned her latest cooking attempt. Kiss away her tears and tell her he loved her, no matter what. Instead, he’d said nothing. Just walked out of the room and said nothing. And nothing was the thing Jen couldn’t get past. She was perfectly right in leaving and telling him to stay away.

  The memory of that awful night pressed against her throat. She, Sylvie, and John had been trying to play three-handed bridge when she’d felt the pain. A blinding, all-consuming tearing of her insides, then warmth trickling down her legs. She’d squeezed them together, willing it to be all right. John and Sylvie rushed her to the hospital. The baby who’d shared her body for four months was dead. She’d asked the nurse what sex it had been. The nurse confirmed what her heart already knew. She’d named him Robert Lancelot Davies. She’d buried her face in the pillow to muffle her sobs.

  The note from Lance came the day they released her from the hospital. Dear Jen, I know you don’t want to be with me, but don’t you think we should try one more time for the sake of the baby? Lance.

  Not, I love you. Not, I can’t live without you. Not a response to her funny postcard. Just a reasoned plea for the sake of their baby.

  She’d scratched out a note on the hotel stationery and mailed it, still in the grip of grief and temper. No baby. Still want to try again?

  He never answered. By the time she’d made it back to London, he’d already moved out of their flat. She’d received the divorce papers three months later. She’d signed them, stabbing her signature into the paper, mailed them back, and forbidden her family to mention his name in her presence.

  Jen gazed around the bedroom which used to be hers, taking comfort in its familiarity. Walls painted in the pink called ashes of roses. White wainscoting. The only artworks were Kathryn’s drawings. Jen had had them professionally framed and Kathryn had been so proud. The white, painted bookshelf was still full of romances and fairy tales. Two jade velvet easy chairs, one with a footstool for Kathryn’s short legs, flanked the mahogany piecrust table. On it, a box of tissues sat next to a lamp with a base of an entwined shepherdess and her swain.

  Jen rolled off the bed and headed for the tissues. When the soft knock sounded she wanted to ignore it. But what if it was Kathryn with one of her nightmares?

  She stomped to the door.

  Lance stood there, hands white-knuckled on either side of the doorframe. He looked . . . shattered. “When I mentioned the baby, you were devastated. You didn’t abort the baby, did you?” His voice cracked. “Why did you let me think you had?”

  Jen erupted. “Why did I let you think it? What kind of person did you think you’d married? All I said to you was I was going to have a terrible time playing Kate while I was pregnant! And. You. Shut. Off. You’re the one who thought I was talking about abortion! I would never have done a thing like that.” She pounded on his chest with all her strength.

  He covered her fists with his hands, then cradled her in his arms. “You’re right. I was a total shit. I am so sorry.” He massaged her back in a soothing rhythm. “I thought you were working up to a fight I didn’t want to have. Walking out was daft. I should have stayed and let you fight with me. When I got home, you were asleep. I was going to make it right somehow in the morning. But when I woke up, you were gone. And your note said you were off to Australia and I was to stay out of your life. What happened?”

  She rested her cheek against his chest. His scent was the same. His favorite aftershave and something else that was just Lance. Her heart slowed down, synchronizing its beat with his. “The first two months were awful. I was into rehearsal and so goddamned sick. I couldn’t keep anything down. By the end of the third month, I was feeling better. I’d mellowed enough toward you to send a postcard. I began looking at baby clothes and thinking about decorating the nursery. Then I started bleeding.” Jen’s throat felt swollen with grief. “The doctors said miscarriages happen a lot with baby boys.”

  Lance dropped his head to hers. “Why didn’t you call? I would have come like a shot. I would never have left you to bear it alone.”

  She felt his tears fall onto the back of her neck. Cry me a river. A few tears couldn’t heal all the hurt he’d caused her.

  She pushed him away. “Nice to know. But it’s over. Goodnight.”

  “It’s not over, Jen.” He took her lips gently. He tasted of honey and ginger and a sweet flavor which used to mean everything to her. Of their own volition, her arms stole around his neck.

  What on earth was she doing? Bad arms. Stop! Her traitorous body moved closer to his.

  Lance deepened the kiss. It felt like the first time all over again. He molded her to him fusing them at the hip. They broke for air. “I want you, Guinevere. That part has never changed.”

  No, it hadn’t. He’d always been the tinder to her flame. But it wasn’t enough. She pressed her palms against his chest. “You don’t know me anymore. And I don’t know you. I don’t go to bed with strangers.”

  His arms dropped away. “You don’t believe in second chances?” He looked like she’d kicked his puppy.

  Did she? Yesterday she would have said no. But yesterday she didn’t believe in time travel. “I don’t know.” She pulled away, not sure if she could forgive him. “Things are mucked up enough. I don’t want to make another mistake. I’m going to bed. Alone.”

  “I’ll stay in Jeremy’s room tonight. I left him a message.” There was no missing the thread of frustration in his voice.

  “Fine. I need to grab one of Jeremy’s shirts. I’ve nothing to sleep in.”

 
Lance’s lips quirked up in a hopeful smile. “Sure you don’t want some help staying warm?”

  “I’m sure.” She wasn’t. “Sleep well.”

  Her bedroom door opened. Kitty-Kat stood there looking sleep-mussed and confused. “Uncle Lance, why are you in Aunt Jen’s room?”

  Lance’s face reddened.

  “Uncle Lance was just saying goodnight. What are you doing up? I thought you were asleep.”

  “I woke up.” Kathryn hung her head. “Where are my jeans? I need them.”

  “In the living room. Why?”

  “I need what’s in the pocket. Come down with me. Please.”

  Jen and Lance followed Kathryn down the stairs. Jen switched on the wall sconce lights in the living room. The plastic bag from the thrift store lay on the rosewood end table where Jen had dropped it when she’d searched for the papers to give to Lance. Jen pulled out the jeans and handed them to Kathryn. “Here you go, my love.”

  Kathryn extracted a folded piece of paper from the jeans’ pocket, unwrapping a tattered rose-pink silk square. “I found it.” She sat on the ivory brocade armchair, rubbing it between her fingers. “I think I’ll sleep down here tonight.”

  The penny dropped. That’s why Kathryn brought them to the past. Some part of her was still looking for her mother. For two years after Laura left, Kathryn fell asleep every night in the same chair holding her silky blanket, waiting for her mother to reappear. Then Jeremy would carry her to her room and tuck her in.

  Jen stroked Kat’s curls. “Kitty-Kat, your blanket isn’t big enough to cover you anymore. You’ll be warmer in your bed.”

  Kathryn blinked. For an instant, Jen saw a flash of grown-up Kat in her eyes. Then she went back to being Kitty-Kat. “Can I sleep with you tonight?”

  “Of course you can. Now spit-spot into bed. I’ll be up in a minute.”