by Kat Cantrell
God, was he fourteen again? He was an adult who could surely find a better way to describe how his insides got a little brighter at the mere thought of his wife. But what was he supposed to say about the woman he woke up to every morning? Or about how he hadn’t yet figured out why his marriage wasn’t making him run screaming for the hills?
“I can tell,” his mom said lightly. “I’m headed to see her next. You wanna come with me?”
His eyebrows shot up automatically. “You’re going to see Roz?”
Helene and his wife weren’t having lunch any longer even though he’d told Roz repeatedly that it was fine if she built a friendship with Helene. He still felt like he’d nipped that relationship in the bud prematurely. It didn’t sit well and if they were mending the fences he’d knocked down, he definitely didn’t want to get between them again.
“I am,” she confirmed. “I can’t put off my promise to her any longer and still sleep at night. So I’m doing the clown thing. Full makeup and all.”
“The press will eat it up,” he promised and she nodded her agreement.
“Yes, I’m counting on it. It should be quite a circus, no pun intended.”
He laughed, glad that despite the many other changes that had been forced on them over the years, they could still hang out and crack jokes with each other. He’d never censored one word to his mother and she was the one person he could be completely real with.
Well, not the only one. He could be real with Roz. He’d never censored anything he’d said to her either, a first. Usually he watched what he said to women because who wanted to give false expectations? But his relationship with Roz required absolute honesty from the get-go and it was a facet of their relationship he hadn’t fully appreciated until now.
Tomorrow if he woke up and knew with certainty that he was done, he just had to announce it was time to file for divorce and she’d say okay. It was freeing to know he never had to pull punches with the woman he was sleeping with.
Not so freeing to be contemplating the fact that he’d practically been handed permission to bring up that divorce. He wasn’t ready to think about that. They hadn’t been married that long and surely Helene would want them to see this thing through a little while longer. Just to be absolutely certain that a divorce wouldn’t undo all the good they’d done already.
“I have to admit, I’m intrigued by the whole clown idea,” he told her. “But I have that presentation on restructuring the supply chain and I need to do a thorough sweep of the warehouse like I’ve been threatening to do for weeks.”
Helene wrinkled her nose. “That sounds boring.”
“Because it is. Being the CEO isn’t all curly wigs and water-squirting flowers.” Neither was being a political candidate, but she knew he was kidding.
“That’s the benefit of being the boss,” she reminded him and pushed him ahead of her out of the break room where his admin had started cleaning up the leftover boxes. “You can leave the boring stuff for another day and come watch me be a clown. It’s for a good cause. And it’s an opportunity to be seen with your lovely bride in a stellar photo op where everyone will not only be dressed but overdressed.”
Seeing Roz in the middle of the day for no other reason than because he wanted to held enormous appeal that he chose not to examine too closely. And it was coupled with an opportunity to see what she did on a daily basis unobtrusively. He did have a certain curiosity about her charity. Because...clowns. It was such a strange thing to be passionate about.
“Sold.” He buttoned his suit jacket. “Let me—”
“Not one foot in your office or you’ll never emerge.” Helene looped an arm through the crook of his elbow and tugged. “Ride with me in my car. We’ll drop you off back here to get your car later.”
And that was how he found himself at Carolina Presbyterian Hospital with his mother in clown makeup. The children’s ward was a lively place, if not a little depressing. Easy to see why clowns might make the whole thing a tiny bit less awful. God willing, he’d never have to personally empathize with what these families were going through. He made a mental note to write Roz a check, which he should have done a long time ago.
He snuck a glance at Roz from the corner of his eye as he lounged in the spot he’d reserved for himself, which was well out of the way, yet afforded him a front-row seat for the show. His wife was gorgeous, focused and quite possibly the tensest he’d ever seen her, including the time they’d braved the florist, their wedding reception and, his least favorite, the encounter with her father in the hall after nearly being caught with their pants down.
Either she didn’t like that he’d accompanied his mother or she was worried that something was going to go wrong with this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get buzz for her charity.
While Helene entertained the kids with stuffed animals she’d carried into the hospital in a big bag, Hendrix edged toward Roz, who had yet to acknowledge his existence. Not that he was nursing a teeny bit of hurt over that or anything.
“Hey,” he murmured, mindful of the two separate news crews that were covering the gubernatorial candidate’s foray into the world of therapy clowning, a thing he’d had no idea had a name, but apparently did.
“Hey.” Her mouth pinched back into a straight line that he immediately wanted to kiss away.
Definitely tense and dang it if it wasn’t on the tip of his tongue to suggest they find a closet somewhere because she was wound tight. But they weren’t that couple any longer. For a reason. So he’d have to handle his wife’s tension verbally. “You have a problem with me being here?”
“What?” She glanced at him and then immediately flicked her gaze back to Helene. “No. I don’t care. It’s a free country.”
Which was the kind of thing you said when you did care but hadn’t planned on letting anyone else in on the secret.
“Your shoes are too tight?” he guessed but she didn’t smile at the joke.
“This is a big deal, Hendrix. I’m allowed to be nervous.”
The sarcasm lacing the edge of her words was pure Roz, but he’d spent far too much time in her company to accept her comment as pure truth. She wasn’t nervous. Tense, yes. But it wasn’t nerves.
And like what had happened at their engagement party, he was nothing if not painfully aware that he could read her so easily because he was paying attention to her, not how best to get under that severe suit she’d donned like armor.
“She’s doing fine,” he told her with a nod toward his mom. “Come get some coffee with me.”
Roz shot him another side-eyed glance, as if afraid to take her gaze off Helene for one second. “I can’t leave. This is my charity on the line.”
“On the line?” he repeated. “Like if Mom does the wrong thing, it’s all going to collapse? You know no one is going to stop letting you do clowns just because she fails to make one of the kids smile, right?”
Her shoulders rolled back a couple of times as if she couldn’t find a comfortable stance. “Maybe not. But maybe it’s all going to collapse for other reasons.”
That wasn’t the fierce Rosalind Carpenter he knew. “If it does, that’s not on you.”
“It is,” she hissed back under her breath. “Why do you think I needed your mother in the first place? Not because I thought kids would like to meet the woman who may be the governor by January.”
“Will be,” he corrected automatically because there was no way Helene was going to fail to reach her goal, not if he had anything to say about it. After all, he’d signed a marriage license to ensure that his mom got to move into the Governor’s Mansion. The fact that his marriage had become so much more still wasn’t something he had a handle on. “Why don’t you clue me in on why Helene is really here if it’s not to bring joy to some sick kids?”
Roz’s eyes snapped shut and her chest heaved a c
ouple of times through some deep breaths. “Actually, coffee would be good.”
Despite being certain she’d found yet another avoidance tactic since she couldn’t use sex, he nodded once and put a hand to her waist to guide her out of the room. After all, coffee had been his suggestion, but not because he’d intended to give her an out. It was a little uncomfortable to realize that while he might not be censoring his words with her, that didn’t mean she was returning the favor.
And he wanted to know what was swirling beneath her skin. He wanted to know her. They might be on the downslide, but he couldn’t contemplate letting her go, not right now. There was still too much to explore here.
Instead of taking her to the cafeteria where the coffee would be weak and tepid, he texted his driver to hit the Starbucks on the corner, then found the most private corner in the surprisingly busy children’s ward. He let Roz choose her seat and then took the opposite one.
She stared out the window, and he stared at her. The severe hairstyle she’d chosen pulled at her lush features, but nothing could change the radiance that gave her such a traffic-stopping face. When he’d left her this morning, she’d still been in bed, her long dark hair tumbling over her shoulders the way he liked it.
But he didn’t think she’d appreciate it if he pulled the pins free right here in the middle of the hospital. “Coffee’s on its way.”
She nodded. “Thanks. I need it.”
“This is the conversation you want to have?”
Her mouth tightened. “I didn’t want to have a conversation at all.”
“But you needed the air,” he guessed and her wince said he’d called it in one. “Roz, I’m not going to bite. If you want to talk to me, I’m not going anywhere. But if you don’t, then let’s sit here while you collect yourself. Then we’ll go back and do clowns with no one the wiser that you had an anxiety attack or whatever.”
Her double take was so sharp, it should have knocked her off the chair. “Anxiety attack? Is that what it looked like? Could you tell I was mid-freak-out? Oh, God. Did any of the cameras pick it up? They did. Of course they did. They’re all over the place and—”
“Sweetheart, you need to breathe now.” He gathered up both her hands in his and held them in his lap, rubbing at her wrists as he racked his brain for information about what he’d accidently triggered with his random comment. “Breathe. Again. Roz. Look at me.”
She did and no, he hadn’t imagined the wild flare of her irises a moment ago. Something had her spooked. But she was breathing as instructed, though the death grip she had on his hands would leave a mark, particularly where her wedding rings bit into his index finger. Didn’t matter. He didn’t have any intention of letting her go.
His driver appeared with two lattes, set them on the table and vanished quickly. Hendrix ignored the white-and-green cups in favor of his alternately white-and-green wife, who, if he didn’t miss his guess, might actually be about to lose her lunch.
“Um...” How did you go about delicately asking your wife if she had a positive test result to discuss? “Are you feeling faint? Do I need to call a doctor?”
What if she was pregnant? A thousand different things flashed through his head in an instant. But only some of them were of the panicked variety. Some weren’t that unpleasant. Some were maybe even a little bit awed and hopeful.
“Oh, God, no!” she burst out. “Please don’t bother anyone. I’m fine.”
“Of course you are,” he murmured and rubbed at her wrists again. “But maybe you could give me a little more to go on as to why we’re sitting here in the corner not drinking the hot coffee that I got for us?”
She slipped a hand from his before he was ready to lose the contact and palmed her cup, sipped at the contents and shot him a fake smile. “See? Drinking.”
“See?” He waved a hand in front of his face. “Still sitting here in the dark about what’s going on with you. Roz, we’re married. I’ve touched you in the most intimate places. I’ve done more illicit, dirty, sinful things with you than with anyone else in my life. You fell asleep in my arms last night. What is all of that but a demonstration of trust? There is nothing you can say to me that would change—”
“I’m afraid of clowns.”
* * *
Oh, God. Now it was out there and Roz had nowhere to hide. She’d blurted out her deepest secret and even worse, she’d done it in the middle of Helene’s shot in the arm for Clown-Around.
Hendrix wasn’t laughing. He should be. There was nothing scary about clowns. Especially not when it was her mother-in-law underneath the makeup. Geez, she’d half thought seeing Helene all dressed up would be the magic bullet to fix all of the crazy going on inside that had only gotten worse the more Roz forced herself to be around the source of her fear.
“Okay.” Hendrix’s beautiful eyes flashed as he removed the coffee from her grip and recaptured her hand. As if he knew that holding her in place was something she desperately needed but didn’t know how to ask for. “That’s not what I thought you were going to say.”
“No, probably not.” Her mouth twisted into a wry smile designed to disguise the fact that she wished she could cry. “I wasn’t expecting me to say it, either. It’s dumb, I know.”
He shook his head fiercely. “No. What’s dumb is that you’re holding all of it inside when I’m here. Tell me what I can do, sweetheart.”
That’s when her heart fluttered so hard that there was no way it could possibly stay behind her rib cage. Now she was feeling light-headed and like she might need a doctor to fix whatever he’d just broken inside her.
“Hold my hand,” she mumbled because what else was she supposed to say when his impassioned statements might loosen her tear ducts after all?
“I am. I’m not going to stop.”
He wouldn’t, either. Because he was Hendrix Harris, the hero of her story, who stood up to her father and had such a good relationship with his mother that he’d willingly marry the wild Carpenter daughter with seemingly nothing to personally gain from it. In bed, he worshipped Roz. Out of it, he talked her down. He was everything she’d never have said she wanted—but did—and that was pushing buttons inside that weren’t meshing well with clowns.
But at least she didn’t feel like she was standing on the edge of a mile-high cliff any longer, legs about to give out as the darkness yawned at her feet. She could breathe. Thanks to Hendrix.
“I started Clown-Around because I needed to stop being afraid.” He didn’t blink as she blurted out her second-biggest secret, and he didn’t interrupt with a bunch of advice on how to fix it. “I really thought it was going to work.”
“Facing your fears is a good step,” he agreed and shut his mouth expectantly, as if to indicate this was still a conversation and it was her turn again. He was good at that and she didn’t mistake it as anything other than a skill.
That or he was just good at being with her, and she might appreciate that even more.
It was the thing she clung to as she spilled out the story of her eight-year-old self missing an entire semester of school because no one could figure out how to tell her she wasn’t allowed to sit at the bedside of her dying mother.
At first, they’d tried. Her nanny would drive her to school, only to get a call from the headmistress that Roz had snuck out again. Fortunately, her father had found her at the hospital before the police had gotten involved, but his mandate that she not try that trick again had only fueled her need to both defy him and spend time with her mother. Sneaking out of school became great practice for later, when she did it to hang out with boys nearly twice her age.
As she recalled all of it for Hendrix, she didn’t leave any of it out, especially not the ugly parts because he deserved to know what was going on with her, as he’d asked to.
“She was so sick,” Roz recalled, not bothering to wip
e the stream of tears that finally flowed. They’d just be followed by more. “The chemo was almost worse than the cancer and they’d come to get her for the treatments. I wouldn’t let her go. There were these clowns.”
She shuddered involuntarily, but Hendrix didn’t say anything, just kept rubbing a thumb over the pulse point of her wrist, which was oddly comforting.
“Every day, I imagined that I was helping draw all the poison from her body when I sat by her bedside and held her hand. But they wouldn’t let me go with her to the treatments and when she came back, it was like they’d sucked a little more of her life away.”
Verbalizing all of this was not helping. If anything, the absolute terror of it became that much fresher as she relived how the two clowns wrenched her hand out of her mother’s, with their big fake smiles and balloon animal distractions. They’d been employed by the hospital administration to keep her out of the way as the staff tried to care for her mother. She knew that as a rational adult. But the associations in her head with clowns and the way her mother slipped away more and more each day—that association wasn’t fading like the psychologists had said it would.
“And now you know the worst about me,” she informed him blithely.
Instead of responding, he dashed away the tears from her cheeks with one thumb, still clinging to her other hand as promised. His strength was amazing, and definitely not a quality she’d have put on her top twenty when it came to men. It was a bonus, particularly since he had twenty out of twenty on the list of what she’d have said would embody her perfect man.
What was she going to do with him?
Divorce him, most likely. Her heart lurched as she forced herself to accept the reality that all of his solid, quiet strength, the strength that was currently holding her together, wasn’t permanent. She didn’t get to keep things. The clowns were a great big reminder of that, one she needed to heed well.