But regrets about the divorce were useless. Hadn’t he been telling himself that since the day it was final?
He’d be, more or less, a single father. And he’d just have to make every precious moment with his child count.
And yet, there was something very lonely about that idea. So lonely it was like a fist in his gut.
The picture his mind should have been conjuring up was of Beth and him standing together over the crib. Or of both of them watching the baby splashing in the tub. Or of their taking turns rocking it or walking the floors with it through the night...
“Well, that’s not how it is. Or how it’s going to be, so get over it,” he ordered himself, trying to shake off the anger and those regrets he’d been fighting.
It wasn’t easy, though. Nobody could get to him the way Beth could.
Good and bad.
And it didn’t help that some of the good was still there.
Even in the midst of his rage at her yesterday, he’d still been drawn to her.
He’d watched her walk into the living room ahead of him and his hand had itched to reach out and touch her.
He’d remained standing behind the couch, hoping that distance and the barrier would keep things in perspective for him, when his damn brain had suddenly kicked in with images of what she looked like after they’d made love—all soft and warm and heavy lidded; of what she tasted like when he kissed her naked shoulder and found her slightly salty from the mingling of his sweat and hers from the heat of the moments just before; of what it felt like to be inside of her, to have her hold on tight to him, wrap her legs around him, cry out his name...
How the hell could he be so mad at her and hungry for her at the same time?
But he had been.
He was.
Wanting her didn’t change anything, though, and he knew he had to keep himself focused on the future, not on the past.
The baby was all he needed to think about. And carving out his place with it.
He had no business at all thinking about his wife.
His ex-wife.
And that distinction was something he’d better not forget.
* * *
Beth had a lot planned for that day, but she was having a hard time getting herself going. She’d made it as far as into her bathrobe and downstairs to fix herself a cup of tea, but that was it. Here it was, late in the morning, and she was back in bed, still sitting propped on her pillows, staring into space.
Well, not exactly into space.
She was staring at that orange crate Ash had left the day before. She’d carted it upstairs after he’d gone and set it on the floor in the corner.
She might have just put the whole crate in the trash except that she knew the things she’d forgotten at the dry cleaners were some of her best. The trouble was, to get to them, she had to go through those items that really belonged to Ash.
Why hadn’t he just kept them? Or thrown them out, if he hadn’t wanted them back? Surely leaving them behind had made it clear she didn’t want them.
Except that she sort of did.
It was just the memories that went with them that she didn’t want.
But neither the crate nor the memories were going away, and she’d been sitting there much too long willing them to. She knew she was being silly. And silliness was another of those things that Shag would never have allowed in this house.
“Just pull out the stuff that’s yours and then put the crate and the rest of it in the trash out back,” she told herself as if there were nothing to it.
Pretending that that was the truth, she got out of bed, crossed the room, knelt down beside the offending box in the corner and quickly took the four top items off, setting them aside without more than a cursory glance at them.
“See? You were making a mountain out of a molehill.”
What was left in the crate was a silk suit and a blazer still in the cleaner’s plastic. She took them out and hung them in her closet. Then there were several items of winter clothing she’d kept in the bedroom of the house on the reservation that would have been the nursery. Those she stuffed into the bottom drawers of the bureau that faced the bed.
And that was that. She had only to toss those first few articles back into the crate, get rid of it, and she could be done with this whole business.
But was she sure she really wanted to just throw those things away? her traitorous mind asked her as she bent over to pick them up.
There was a great big, plaid cashmere bathrobe that was so old and worn around the edges that it wasn’t even fit to give to charity. And yet when her hands clasped the downy softness, she couldn’t resist fingering it, rubbing her palms against it, finally slipping it on, smoothing the ragged lapels over her chest.
She’d replaced it for Ash their first Christmas together, but when she’d been about to throw it out the next day she hadn’t been able to. It had occurred to her that if she got rid of it she wouldn’t have it to wear on cold Sunday mornings when she was padding around in her pajamas and stocking feet, or to pull over her when she was sick and lying on the couch.
There was something comforting about it in a way her own robe didn’t match. It wasn’t just that it was warm or soft or broken in; it always made her feel as if Ash himself were wrapped around her.
Just like now...
“This has to go,” she said firmly, shrugging out of it as if it made her itch and tossing it into the crate.
Then there was his college sweatshirt.
She thought he would have wanted that back for sure. After all, it was a memento of his fraternity.
For Beth, on the other hand, it was a memento of something else.
The first time she’d worn it had been during a game of Boat.
Boat was something she’d heard a therapist on the radio suggest to a caller with marital problems. Beth hadn’t considered what was happening in her own marriage a problem at that point—after all, it had only been a month since their wedding. But the game had seemed like a way to lure Ash home from doing paperwork at his office on a Sunday afternoon.
The instructions were to gather special foods and wine and maybe some body oils or lotions in a basket. Thus equipped, the basket was then to be taken to the bed, which was designated as a boat in the middle of the ocean, and, for a time, they couldn’t leave it for any reason.
Ash had been only too happy to go along with the idea. He’d undressed her and flung her clothes far out into their imaginary sea. After they’d put the lotions and oils to good use, the only article of clothing she could reach when she’d wanted to dress again before their picnic had been his college sweatshirt.
That sweatshirt had become a part of the Boat basket from then on.
Unfortunately Boat had lost more and more of its power to bring Ash home as the years had gone on, until Beth had given up trying. Still, the memory of that first time was so sweet it hurt.
She folded the sweatshirt and set it in the crate with the robe.
A white dress shirt was the third item lying on her bedroom floor at that moment. It had become hers during a long business trip Ash had taken early in their marriage. He’d left it for her to launder. But when she’d tried to do that, the scent of it had reached out to her. Ash’s scent. That mingling of his clean, spicy after-shave and the masculine smell of his skin.
She’d ended up not washing it at all, but wearing it around the house to stave off the loneliness.
It surprised her a little that he’d known to bring it to her. It was a plain white shirt, like so many of his others, except that it had a tiny flaw in the weave of the cuff. From that trip on, she’d kept the shirt, laundering it only when she knew he was about to leave again and slipping it in with his other shirts so that he’d wear it just before, infuse it with his scent, and then she’d have it after he’d gone.
“He knew all along,” she whispered, embarrassed that he had realized what she was doing.
He’d never let on that he was awar
e the shirt appeared in his drawer only periodically before disappearing again. But obviously he’d known that she’d considered it her shirt.
On their own, her hands brought it up to her nose and she breathed in the faint lingering of what had comforted her before. But there was no comfort in it now. There was only a terrible pang for what was lost.
She folded it with the care of a soldier folding a burial flag and set it in the crate.
That left the pajama top. Ash’s pajama top.
From the beginning of their marriage he’d worn the bottoms and she’d worn the tops of every pair he’d owned during their years together.
Technically, she thought, they were as much her pajamas as his. He’d never worn this half.
Yet somehow, the day the divorce was final, she’d decided to put away that portion of the pajamas they’d shared along with the life they’d shared. So when she’d taken off her wedding ring, she’d also removed these pajama tops from her drawer and set them in one of his.
Unfortunately, since then she’d been trying to find something else she liked as well to wear to bed.
Women’s pajamas, T-shirts, nightgowns, nightshirts. She’d even tried sleeping in the nude. But nothing was as comfortable as the silk pajama top she held in her hands at that moment.
“I bought them,” she said. “Think of it as him wearing the bottoms of my pajamas.”
But she wasn’t sure she could.
And yet she also couldn’t seem to make herself put them into the orange crate.
Lord, what was wrong with her? She’d never been so indecisive, so sentimental, so emotional.
And then it occurred to her that maybe more than her appearance could be under the influence of pregnancy hormones.
Of course, that was all it was, she told herself. The roller coaster emotions were caused by the increased hormones in her body. She even remembered reading something about that very thing.
But could they turn her into a different person? For here she was, Shag Heller’s daughter, crying over a pair of pajamas, of all things.
Well, regardless of the cause, she could fight it, she decided. She had to fight it. She wasn’t so weak willed that it could get the best of her.
She snapped the pajamas through the air with one hard flick as if that would rid them of the baggage they came with, spun away from the orange crate and stuffed them into her drawer, slamming it shut so firmly that it set the clock on top of the bureau rocking back and forth.
Twenty minutes to twelve? She couldn’t believe it. And there she was, not even showered yet.
Enough mooning, she told herself, turning toward the bathroom that connected to her room.
She’d throw the clothes out later.
But somewhere in the back of her mind a little voice called her a liar.
And she knew it was right.
Especially when she took a detour and slid the crate into the back of her closet.
* * *
An hour later, Beth finally went downstairs, showered and dressed in a sleeveless, oversize chambray shirt with tails that reached nearly to her jean-clad knees, her hair freshly washed and fluffed. She intended to go straight out the front door and make her first stop Kansas’s country store to see if by some chance her old friend might not have had lunch yet and could be persuaded to join her. But she only made it as far as the bottom step before spotting Ash sitting in the living room watching for her.
She couldn’t believe it.
She’d never known him to actually free up time before, so she hadn’t really taken his threat to do it now too seriously. At the most, she’d expected that he might do business from his cabin at the lodge for a few days, popping up once or twice in the evenings before being called away again.
But there he was, in the middle of the day, with a cup of coffee in one hand, an open briefcase on the table in front of him, a file folder in his lap and papers scattered around as if he’d been there for a while already.
“Morning. Not that it still is. Have you been upstairs asleep all this time?” he greeted amiably.
But Beth was not feeling amiable about his being there. Nor was she going to admit that she’d been awake but crying over his old things. “What are you doing here?” she demanded ungraciously as she crossed to the living room.
“Exactly what I said I was going to do. My calendar is clear and I’m all yours.”
Her heart took a wild skip at that but she tamed it in a hurry. He hadn’t been all hers when they were married, he certainly wasn’t now. “This is crazy. You’re a busy man, I don’t need or want a shadow, so why don’t you just get in your car and—”
“I’m not going anywhere,” he told her with enough finality to end her rebuttal. He scooped all the papers into the file, deposited it in the briefcase and closed it with a loud snap that seemed to seal the end to the argument. Then he stood.
And she wished he hadn’t.
He had on a black T-shirt that smoothed across his broad shoulders and stretched so far around his biceps that the seams were strained. Gleaming against the mock turtleneck just below his throat he wore a talisman he was never without—a burnished copper eagle arrowhead hanging from a thin black cord. His stomach was perfectly flat beneath the taut knit, and when her gaze drifted down that washboard hardness she found a pair of tight, faded blue jeans.
No one could do for a pair of jeans what Asher Blackwolf could.
They rode low on his narrow hips and cupped his every bulging muscle like a second skin. Beth had always loved the way jeans looked on him, though she didn’t get to see the look often because he didn’t spend a lot of time dressed that casually. Maybe part of the reason she liked it so much was that those rare occasions meant she really did have him all to herself.
But she didn’t want him all to herself anymore, she reminded herself. She couldn’t.
“What’s on your agenda today? You looked as if you were headed out,” he said, drawing her attention away from his appearance.
“I have errands to run,” she answered, her words clipped and her irritation sounding.
“Great. I’ll drive.”
“Shopping errands,” she said, upping the ante. “You know, the kind of thing Miss Lightfeather does instead of you?”
He ignored the barb and repeated, “I’ll drive.”
“This is ridiculous. The things I have to do today will bore you to tears and they don’t have anything to do with the baby.” Well, that wasn’t exactly true, but the errand she needed to run that did have a connection to the baby was not one she wanted Ash’s company on—she needed maternity bras.
“You’re not getting rid of me, Beth.”
“There just isn’t a point to this,” she insisted, exasperated by his stubbornness. “How about if I agree to start sending you a newsletter? I’ll write once a week, tell you about every ache or pain or twinge I have, keep you completely updated. You’ll know as much about my heartburn as I do. It’ll be the same as being here, only you can go on about your business and so can I.”
His expression said he was annoyed with her, but he merely tilted his head and stared at her out of the corner of his eye. “I’ll drive,” he repeated yet again.
The way he’d angled his chin had given her a view of the fading bruise left by Jackson’s punch, and the sight of it made her feel slightly guilty. It cut short the argument that was bubbling inside of her. He wouldn’t be around long anyway before something called him away, she reminded herself. “Oh, fine. But don’t say you weren’t warned.”
For the second time that day she spun on her heels, heading for the door ahead of him. But his legs were much longer than hers and they reached the door at the same time, with Ash bending over her to open it before she could.
Did he think being pregnant made her incapable of opening a door for herself, for crying out loud? But more than the courtesy, what irked her was that when he got that near to her she could smell his after-shave and it went right to her silly head.
/>
“How about some lunch?” he asked as they walked to his car.
“I’m not hungry,” she snapped, because it was true. The man irritated her so much she’d lost her appetite.
“Hungry or not, you need to eat. You’re skin and bones,” he decreed as he held the car door for her, too. “It looks like somebody better pay some attention to what you’re doing to yourself and my baby.”
Beth merely glared at him as he ordered her to buckle her seat belt and closed the door.
Their first stop was at Margie Wilson’s café, where Ash canceled Beth’s order of a sweet roll and coffee and instead insisted she be brought a turkey club sandwich, a salad and a glass of milk.
Beth seriously considered letting the food sit there and rot, but by the time it arrived, her appetite had returned, too, and she ate.
Besides, it was served by Margie Wilson herself, who always fussed over her, and Beth wouldn’t have hurt the other woman’s feelings for the world.
“I see she carries more weight with you than I do,” Ash observed when the café owner left them alone after actually persuading Beth to drink some of the milk he’d ordered.
“Margie is a nice lady. And I’ve always felt bad that my father didn’t do right by her.”
Ash’s eyebrows rose in curiosity as he chewed a bite of his hamburger.
Beth wasn’t fond of sitting in silence, so she elaborated. “Shag kept company with her for years. Not openly. He believed that it was wrong for Linc, Jackson or me to ever see him with a woman other than our mother—”
She stalled a moment, thinking that she understood that notion now, because she didn’t at all like the idea of her child seeing Ash with another woman.
Or of her seeing him with one, either, for that matter...
She pushed the thought and the feelings that came with it away and went on. “But everyone in town—including me and my brothers—knew that Margie had back-door visits from Shag for years. We all thought that eventually—probably when we were grown—he’d marry her.”
Baby My Baby (A Ranching Family) Page 5