David opened a rolltop desk in the corner to reveal a computer. He dug into one of the cubbyholes beside the mouse and came up with a set of keys dangling from a John Deere-tractor key ring. He handed them to Kate, and as she took them, he closed his fingers over hers. “Don’t go.”
She swallowed, but left her hand in his. “I’ve got things to do, people to see.”
“Kate, do you have any idea what it’s like to see you again? To have you here?”
“David...”
“Listen to me. It was all I could do yesterday not to sweep you up in my arms and drag you off to my cave.”
“And leave Jason sitting in jail?”
“That’s the only reason I didn’t.” He grinned ruefully, “That, and the fact that you would have fought me like a tiger.” He turned her hand over and bent his head to brush her palm with his lips.
She felt the waves of heat welling up from her center, heat so strong that for a moment she felt as though she’d pass out. She couldn’t deny that his touch, his voice, the sight and sound of him opened her to emotions she had denied for far too long. She should turn around and run, but as his lips found their way to the pulse in her wrist, as his other arm encircled her waist and drew her to him, she resisted only for a moment before she let herself be drawn against his chest.
Her body remembered him, fitted against him so familiarly that twenty years were wiped out in an instant. She closed her eyes and felt his lips sweep her temples, her eyelids, and finally touch her lips. She opened to his kiss as she always had, feeling tendrils of flame lick her, torment her with a need for him she’d denied for too long.
Suddenly she stiffened. “No! I can’t do this. Not again. Not ever again!” She tried to pull away, but he held her. She felt his breath on her cheek. She couldn’t breathe without scenting him. “Please, let me go.” She twisted out of his grasp and started for the door.
He called after her, “Kate, stop, please.”
“My memory’s not that convenient. You obviously don’t remember our last encounter.”
“I remember,” he said, and followed her. The urgency of his voice stopped her with one hand on the doorknob. “But what I remember most is your soft eyes when I’d look down into your face while we made love, the taste of your tongue, and the hills and valleys of the roof of your mouth.” He moved behind her and ran his hands down her shoulders and arms.
Against her will she closed her eyes and leaned back against him.
He whispered, his voice close to her ear so that she could feel his breath. “I remember the way your lovely long hair fell across my chest like a damask curtain when you made love to me. I remember the way your breasts fit my hands. I remember the way you opened to me and the arch of your back when you came... I remember the wild times and the tender times and the crazy experiments where we wound up on the floor laughing our heads off. All of it, Katie. Sometimes nearly a whole day goes by when I don’t remember and I think, I’m over her. And then it all floods back and I know I’ll never be free of you. There’s not an inch, a molecule, an atom of you that I don’t remember and want.”
She clenched her fists and crossed her arms over her breasts. “Then why wasn’t I enough?”
“You were more than enough.”
She slipped out of his grasp. As much as she wanted to run, maybe it was time to have this out between them. She strode to the fireplace and braced her hand against the rough-hewn mantel. “If I’d been enough, if you’d loved me, you wouldn’t have needed anyone else.”
He followed her, and she raised her other hand to stop him five feet away. He sighed deeply. “I could never convince you that I loved you. God knows I tried. When you found out about Melba, you weren’t surprised. You were mad as hell and never wanted to see me again. You walked away without a backward glance, never gave me a chance to explain or to apologize. But you weren’t surprised, because you’d always expected it. I thought then it was because of your father and what he put your mother through, but it wasn’t that, was it?”
She looked at him squarely now and tried to keep her voice steady—the voice she used on judges and juries. It was important to stay in command. Now that confrontation was unavoidable, she wanted everything clear between them. Then maybe she could do her job without thinking about David, being aware of him. “Maybe I wasn’t surprised,” she said carefully. “I knew someday you’d see what a mess I was, how unworthy I was of you. That’s why I tried so hard to make myself indispensable, to do everything I could to help your career, to be the perfect helpmate.”
“You were perfect, Kate. That’s the real reason I went to bed with Melba.”
“What on earth are you talking about? You’re blaming Melba on me? Because I did too much?” She heard her voice rise and fought to keep her anger under control. “My God, David, I thought I’d heard every argument in the world from husbands in court. ‘If only she hadn’t folded the towels wrong, Your Honor, I wouldn’t have broken her jaw. If only she hadn’t gotten the wrong brand of beer, Your Honor, I wouldn’t have knocked her down the stairs.”’ She laughed. “This is the first time I’ve ever heard of a man sleeping around because his wife was too perfect.”
“I didn’t sleep around, Kate.”
“Once is all it takes. So, please, do tell me how my being too perfect caused you to go to bed with another woman. I’m fascinated.”
“I’ve never told anyone this. I couldn’t tell you. All those plans we had when we got married, I was going to set the acting world on fire...”
“And you would have. You had everything.”
“You know what it’s like never to fail, Kate?”
She blew out her breath. “Hardly, I spent most of my life failing everything from kick ball to ‘plays well with others’ to differential calculus.”
“Lucky you.”
“Yeah, right.”
“No, I mean it. You learned early. You failed, you picked yourself up, you dusted yourself off, and you either tried again or went on to something else. You learned it wasn’t the end of the world. I never failed at anything before we went to New York.”
“Don’t I know it.”
“Listen to me, I’m trying to tell you something here.”
She stared at his anguished face a moment, then she said quietly, “All right, I’m sorry.”
He went to the back windows and stared out at the pines. She could barely hear his voice when he started, but the more he spoke, the more he seemed to find the strength to go on.
“My mother taught me I was the golden boy. She put me right on top of that pedestal, and I liked it up there. What I wanted I got, whether it was starting quarterback or starting pitcher, the lead in every play from the sixth grade on, honor roll, Beta Club, national merit scholarship, valedictorian of my class...” His voice trailed off.
She took a step toward him. “David, please don’t stop.” “People liked me.” He shrugged. “They didn’t seem to resent me. I hope they didn’t, anyway.”
“No,” she whispered. “Nobody resented you. You never acted as though any of it was your due. You worked hard, you cared about people, and everybody knew you were going someplace. That’s why I never understood when you picked me.”
“Oh, Kate. I picked you because you believed in me so much,” he said. He moved to the counter and sat on one of the tall bar stools with one foot crooked over a rung.
“I never believed in me. Not once. All my life I thought, one of these days somebody’s going to catch on and then where will I be? I didn’t have a clue who I was or what I wanted, so I tried to want what people said I ought to want. What you said, what my mother said.”
“You were a wonderful actor.”
He shook his head. “In college I could read all my glowing reviews and convince myself maybe I was as good as they said I was. Within three months after we moved to New York I knew damn well I was mediocre and always would be.”
“That’s not true. It’s just hard to break in.”
“Bastard.”
David shrugged. “I knew he was right. All those classes we sweated bullets paying for showed me that. I could do a great first read—really impressive, you know. But I never got any better. I never forgot there was an audience out there watching me, judging me. I saw some others—a few of them are household names today—who submerged themselves in the characters they played. I couldn’t do that.”
She sank onto the couch and leaned toward him. “You were learning your craft as a professional.” How could she have loved him so much and not known he was prey to this kind of insecurity? It was as though she were seeing him for the first time. No, as though he was allowing her to see a part of himself he’d always kept hidden from her. It frightened her, and yet at the same time she resented him for not trusting her.
“I had a very small talent. I wasn’t good enough. And I found out something else. I didn’t want it.”
She sat up, bewildered. “But it’s all we ever talked about, what we planned for, what we worked for.”
“No, Katie, what you worked for. To pay for my tuition, my clothes, my fancy portfolio of pictures, my classes, that crummy apartment with hot-and-cold-running rats and roaches, when I wanted to give you a mansion in Connecticut.”
“Everybody starts out that way.”
“You don’t understand. For the first time, people caught on. I was a fake and a phony. I failed. I didn’t know how to handle it. All of a sudden, I didn’t know who or what I was. I just knew I wasn’t the man you thought I was. And every time I lost another role and came home to you, you told me that I’d get the next part. I knew I was betraying you, lying to you. You made a lousy bargain when you married me.”
“You were never a lousy bargain.”
“Yes, I was.”
“Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you trust me?”
“I couldn’t. You invested everything in my dream...”
“I thought it was our dream together.”
“It wasn’t my dream any longer. I didn’t have any more dreams. I was so damn miserable that I didn’t even want to come home to you for fear you’d read it in my eyes. I was the husband, the breadwinner, the big Broadway star-to-be, and I was a fake and a failure. I wanted to go somewhere, anywhere, where we didn’t have to scrub the soot out of the bathroom every morning, and where my wife didn’t have to work sixty hours a week to keep me in lessons that wouldn’t ever make a difference. And I was afraid if I told you, I’d break your heart. Worse, that you’d leave me.”
“Never.” As she said the words, she wondered if they were true. She wouldn’t have left him, certainly, but she’d have had to adjust to living with a man who was suddenly someone completely different from the person she thought she’d married.
He’d grown in a different direction. Could she have caught up with him? Could she have changed gears from being the wife of a budding New York star to being the wife of a man who didn’t know who or what he wanted to be? To being the wife of an accountant? Or even a farmer?
“When I was at my lowest, that’s when Melba showed up,” he said. “I know now that she came to New York specifically to seduce me, though God knows why she wanted me. She hated you, you know that? She wasn’t used to being dumped. Maybe in the beginning she just wanted to have sex with me to prove she could get back at you. I don’t think it had anything to do with me.”
Now came the resentment, bubbling up inside her. He couldn’t trust his own wife, but he could sleep with an old girlfriend? “But you went along with her.”
“Oh, yeah. I could have taken her out for a drink, or even dinner, Instead I got drunk and wound up taking her upstairs at the Plaza.”
“You were drunk?”
He shook his head. “I can’t use that as an excuse.” He ran his hand over his hair. “I was like a kid who sticks his hand near the stove. I wanted to see how close I could get without getting burned.” He turned away from her to stare out the window as though he could get some answers from the broad fields where he had spent so much of his life. “With Melba I could pretend to be the man I used to think I was for a little while longer. Maintaining a fantasy is a damn heady thing. And I swore to myself you’d never find out.”
“But I did.”
“Yeah. I wasn’t even a good enough actor for that.”
“You could have convinced an audience, but not me. I saw it in the way you avoided my eyes, touched me, laughed too loud and too often. My father was a great role model, remember. You might as well have written, ‘I was unfaithful’ across the bathroom mirror in her lipstick.”
He looked back at her curiously. “But you were already looking for the signs. I did everything I could do to keep you from finding out. I never knew how you did.”
“Oh, come on. Midge Rider couldn’t wait to call me to tell me she’d seen you and Melba all over each other in the Plaza bar.”
“Midge never saw us. And we were never in the Plaza bar. Or any bar.”
Kate looked confused. “But that’s what she said...”
“Midge was Melba’s friend. I guess that’s what Melba told her to say.” David sighed. “Dub got drunk one night and told me it was a setup from the start. But he never told me about Midge. Maybe he didn’t know.”
“And I fell right into the trap.”
“We both fell. But when you disappeared that way, when I found your note, and then when I got the divorce papers... I tried every way I knew to find you—to talk to you.”
She stood, reached for the car keys which she had dropped on the table beside the sofa and started for the door. “And what would you have said if you had? Given me all these reasons why you cheated on me, on us?”
He intercepted her and laid a hand on her arm. “I don’t know what I would have said. Maybe I’d have tried to blame you, or justify myself, or even blame Melba or the liquor. I hope I would have said what I’m saying now. I’m sorry. I was stupid. Please forgive me.”
She caught her breath and shook off his arm. “I have to process all this, David.” She stepped around him and opened the door.
“Don’t disappear on me again, Kate.”
“Not possible so long as I’m your son’s lawyer.”
“Kate...”
She hesitated in the doorway with her back to him. “Maybe I should share the blame. You should have been able to talk to me, but you’re right. I had you up on that pedestal too. You could be anything except human and scared and fallible.” She shook her head and ran her hand through her hair. “I was so wrapped up in my own fantasy—the little wifey-poo, standing in the wings applauding her wonderful husband as he receives his first Tony Award. Reflected glory and all that nonsense.”
“Not a bad dream.”
“No, but it wasn’t your dream, it was mine. Because I was too scared to have any of my own, just for me. You had to slay the dragons and drag home the mastodons. You had to be strong and sure for both of us.”
“Isn’t that what I was supposed to do?”
“Maybe in 50,000 BC.” She shut the door again and leaned against it with her hands behind her back. “And all these years I thought you were suffering because you’d given up your dream of a life in the theater for Melba, when actually, she gave you the one thing I couldn’t—she let you escape.”
“Not escape. More of a prison than you can imagine. But a compensation of a kind. Jason and the land, that is.” He took a single step toward her. “Can you forgive me?”
She didn’t so much make a decision as realize it had already been made somewhere deep within her psyche. It was time to let go. “We were twenty-two years old. We didn’t have a clue about who we were. We were playing at fantasy and great sex and all the rags-to-riches movies we’d ev
er seen. Could be it’s high time to ditch the old baggage.”
“Not the love. And maybe not the great sex.”
“Don’t push your luck.” She managed a wan smile. “But at the very least we have to stop superimposing the faces of the people we were onto the people we’ve become.”
“Can you do that?”
“I don’t know. I do know that you’re a very different man from the boy I married. You’re gentler, but stronger too. And there’s an edge of sadness in you that wasn’t there before. You’ve been tempered. When you were twenty-two I think you’d have talked a lot about that mastodon, and brought it home and presented it to me with trumpets blaring. Now, I think I’d just look in the freezer one day, and there’d be all those mastodon steaks you never bothered to mention.”
“Is that a compliment?” He moved toward her as though he planned to take her in his arms once more.
She reached for the doorknob behind her and opened it. Too soon to touch. She needed to be alone, away from his eyes, the scent of his body, the sight of him, the feel of his fingers and his lips. “A compliment? I think it is. You’ve gotten on with the business of living in a way I haven’t managed. I’m a little jealous.”
“Me? Look at you. You’re at the top of a tough profession. You’re strong and smart and you don’t put up with garbage from anybody or need anybody. I’m just a dirt farmer.”
“Inside I’m still the scared kid who flunked ‘plays well with others.”’
“You had a good marriage—”
“Alec was my best friend, my occasional lover and my colleague, but the fireworks never went off in my heart when he walked into a room. I’d almost forgotten what it felt like to be in love.”
Fathers and Sons (Harlequin Super Romance) Page 9