For the Girls' Sake

by Janice Kay Johnson

Such a small word, to mean so much.

  Satisfied, they galloped away just as quickly, and he went toward his wife who was stirring something on the stove.

  "Spaghetti," he said, seeing the bubbling sauce.

  "Yes, I hope that’s okay."

  He didn’t like it when she sounded anxious.

  "I’ve told you. I’m not picky."

  "That doesn’t mean there aren’t foods you hate," she said with some spirit.

  The sauce smelled good, but he liked even better the clean citrus scent of her hair, caught in a ponytail today. Gorgeous as it was tumbling around her shoulders, Adam found her most irresistible when her hair was up, tiny tendrils escaping to draw his gaze to her slender neck. He wanted to kiss her nape in the worst way.

  She stole a shy look at him and then ducked to clatter in the pan cupboard. "Let me get the spaghetti on," she said in a muffled voice, "and we can eat in ten minutes."

  What if he just kissed her? Was she shy because she was intrigued by him too, or because she saw his intent in his eyes and it scared her?

  Nothing in his experience told him how to handle this courtship. He knew how to romance a woman he was dating, although it had been a long time since he’d done so seriously. But Lynn was his wife. They were getting to know each other, developing a degree of comfort. What if he made an unwelcome advance and blew what progress they’d made?

  Another difficulty was that he didn’t want to be dishonest with her. He liked her, he found her very appealing. But he hadn’t let go of his feelings for Jenny, and he didn’t know if he ever could or wanted to.

  Tenderness, liking, sparks—he was hoping for all those this time around. But he was afraid that if he started bringing home roses, Lynn would get the wrong idea.

  Adam wasn’t sure why that bothered him. He’d married her, after all. He took the vows seriously. He wouldn’t be unfaithful.

  But when he took to thinking about love, he started feeling edgy, uncomfortable. Disloyal. He didn’t want to be a man who slipped on a new wife to replace the old as if they were nothing more than a succession of favorite shirts. He’d loved his Jenny, although already memories were slipping away. He wouldn’t so quickly dishonor her or his feelings.

  But he really wanted to get closer to his second wife.

  Loneliness had been no more than an occasional irritation until he had a woman in his house. Now it was more like a bad back, an ever-present ache that stabbed sharply when he moved wrong.

  Proximity explained it, he kept telling himself. Lynn was a pretty woman, but would he especially have noticed her if he’d happened into her bookstore? No. Love was when you were struck by lightning, when you knew this was it.

  This was just attraction. Plain and simple.

  But something told him putting it that way to her wouldn’t lure her into his arms. Lure. See? Even his choice of words to himself implied a lie.

  "Why don’t you help the girls wash their hands?" She was bustling around him as if he were an inconvenient post holding up the kitchen ceiling. If he’d been staring, she hadn’t noticed or was pretending not to.

  A lot of pretence going on, Adam thought grimly.

  But he was still glad to be home, glad that dinner was bubbling on the stove instead of sitting in the refrigerator with a sticky note from his housekeeper telling him how to cook it. He was glad Rose hadn’t had to spend ten hours at preschool today, and that Shelly had been here to hug him when he walked in the door.

  And he was glad that Lynn would be there after the girls went to bed tonight, quiet company if they both read, good conversation if they chose not to.

  "Sure," he said, "if I can’t do anything here."

  She cast him a mildly amused look as she dumped spaghetti and boiling water into a colander. "Nope. Just get Rose and Shelly."

  At the dinner table, she insisted on good manners, something he’d never done but which seemed, if nothing else, to introduce a different note to mealtimes for the two three-year-olds. At breakfast or lunch, they’d giggle, make messes, even occasionally start food fights. At dinner they were on their best behavior. He liked the change, as he liked most that Lynn had brought with her.

  Tonight the girls told him about the playground and how it had started to snow—slushy rain, Lynn interjected with crinkled nose—and they got all wet but they played anyway—did Daddy know your bottom stuck to a wet slide?—and Mommy made them take a hot bath when they got home.

  "We were sea lions," Shelly told him. Bouncing in her chair, she barked like the ones on the rocks offshore from Otter Beach. "Like that."

  "Yeah. We were both sea lions!" Rose said.

  Lynn laughed. "Of course, most of the bathwater washed up on the beach."

  "The beach!" They thought that was hysterically funny.

  He grinned at her. "Sounds like fun. I hope you had some beach towels."

  "I used half the contents of your linen closet," she said, a smile shimmering in her eyes. "Thank goodness for your little elf."

  "Ann? You don’t see much of her, huh?"

  "She pleasantly made it known she’d just as soon not ‘trip over us.’ I try to either take the girls someplace, or at least keep them out of her hair. She’s going to be glad when we’re gone Thursday."

  He wasn’t. He hated Thursdays. Lynn and Shelly packed up at the crack of dawn and drove away so that Lynn could open the bookstore at ten. He had to drop a sleepy Rose off at day care, where she cried. Ditto Friday, except that instead of the two of them sharing a solitary dinner, they grabbed fast food and headed for the coast and their home away from home.

  Where Rose got to sleep cuddled up to her new sister, while he got the couch.

  After dinner, while he and Lynn companionably cleaned the kitchen, she told him that Brian’s mother had called.

  Brow crinkled, she said, "I think she was ashamed of herself. And maybe ashamed of Brian. She regretted not being more supportive—quote unquote. It was a strange conversation. I haven’t heard from her in months."

  His basic cynicism asserted itself. "What did she want? Rose?"

  Lynn paused with her hands in a soapy pan, her lips pursed. "You know, I really think she was genuine. She said that, when we think the time’s right, she and Walt would like to meet Rose and see Shelly again. She said as far as she was concerned, Shelly would always be her granddaughter. It sounded a little pointed, which is what made me think she was disillusioned about Brian."

  "Her contrition is a little late," Adam growled.

  "Isn’t it better late than never?" Lynn suggested gently.

  He took one last swipe at the counter. "Yeah. Probably. Whatever you want to do about them is okay by me. I can be nice."

  Her smile was quick, amused and approving. "I know you can."

  Thanks to that smile, he was in a very good mood when he started the dishwasher and watched Lynn pour two cups of coffee. He enjoyed their evening talks. To his surprise, she’d shown real interest from the beginning in what he did, how he made decisions on what companies were going to make money for his clients, what triggered his gut feelings. He’d noticed that she was reading a book on investments plucked from her bookstore shelf, which pleased him unreasonably.

  Jenny had laughingly declared that his work was boring. "You don’t even see real products or real money. It’s all on paper. Numbers." She had delicately shuddered. "I don’t know how you can make yourself care."

  Adam remembered arguing. "It’s real, all right. Think of the buying and selling of stocks as the blood running through the veins of the economy. That—" he’d melodramatically stabbed a finger at the open page of closing stock prices "—is the report from the lab technicians who just ran tests on the blood."

  She pouted prettily. "Oh, fine, but we don’t have to talk about it, do we?"

  The subject had been turned that time, and Adam found that he rarely commented on work. Personalities in the brokerage firm where he was now a senior partner, sure. Jenny liked office parties and gossip.
The guts of his work, she didn’t want to hear about.

  The memory bothered him, but he excused her. She’d been young, probably no more than twenty-two. A kid, she would seem to him now. He probably had been prosing on as if some rise or fall in prices was the be-all and end-all of the universe. As if the stock market wouldn’t plunge up and down as often as a frisky colt out to pasture. Of course, it was relatively new to him then. He hadn’t been that much older than Jenny, twenty-five when they set up housekeeping. They were newlyweds, and other topics of conversation hadn’t been hard to find.

  Jenny would have matured if she’d had the chance. He didn’t want to compare her to Lynn. It wasn’t fair. If nothing else, circumstances had been different. Jenny hadn’t needed to take a crash course in her husband’s interests and character. She knew him.

  Except, a disquieting voice murmured in his ear, for the facets of him that didn’t interest her.

  She never suggested he change jobs, Adam argued with himself.

  She liked the money.

  She just didn’t want to be bored by a blow-by-blow account of his day at the dinner table every evening. So what?

  Shouldn’t she have loved the whole man? whispered that insidious voice.

  Maybe, Adam thought, beginning to be irritated. But he didn’t love her any less because she was possibly a little self-absorbed. She’d been spoiled as a kid. When he met and married his Jenny, she was young and beautiful, the center of a crowd at every party. Motherhood would have changed and enriched her, just as loving Rose had irrevocably changed him.

  He’d be willing to bet Lynn had been considerably more frivolous before she’d had a child, too.

  Hard to picture.

  Adam shut the door on any further debate.

  It figured, however, that as if to make a point tonight Lynn brought the book on investing when he and she carried their cups of coffee into the living room.

  Which meant only that she wanted to know who on earth she’d married, Adam countered the voice before it could break the silence. Just as he did.

  "Learning anything?" he asked, nodding at the book.

  Lynn wrinkled her nose. "I think I’m getting more confused. All these formulas. P/E ratios." Sounding honestly puzzled, she asked, "Why not just stick to investing in companies whose products you like? Or stores that are well run and clearly busy? Avoid the stores you hate because merchandise is cheap or clerks are always slow or that you hear people grumbling about? I mean, doesn’t common sense work?"

  “Yeah, to some extent," Adam agreed. "For the individual investor, that’s exactly the advice I’d give."

  She looked pleased.

  "However," he continued, "remember how many of the corporations on the stock market make products that are invisible to the average consumer. Operating software for computers, or a circuit board in airplane navigation systems, or whatever. Also, because a local store is well run and popular doesn’t always mean the whole chain is. Haven’t you had a place you really liked suddenly go out of business? Maybe go bankrupt?"

  Lynn nodded thoughtfully.

  "Could be the problem wasn’t even with that chain of appliance stores or whatever. They might be owned by a giant retailer who has been sucking them dry to plug a drain in another branch of their empire. Maybe this other branch makes jeans, and they haven’t kept up with the youth market. How are you going to know this?"

  "I’m not?"

  "Probably not," Adam agreed. "Our job is to know well ahead of time when problems are going to cause a corporation to retrench or go belly-up. So our clients don’t take a bath. It’s no different than you making informed decisions on what books to carry. Sometimes I imagine you just flat out love a book. Mostly, you’ve learned what your customers will buy. Or won’t buy. I’ll bet you carry stuff you personally despise because you know it sells."

  "Sure I do." She gave a gusty sigh and with an air of dogged resolve flipped open the book. "You’ve convinced me."

  "Are you planning to start investing?" he asked, trying to sound careless.

  "Oh, sure. As soon as I franchise." Her cheeks turned a little pink. "I just thought it might be a good idea if I knew what you were talking about when you have a good day, or a bad one."

  "Ah." A sense of warm satisfaction filled him. When she had said she would give this marriage her best, she’d meant it.

  The evening was typical. They read, she asked questions that spurred brief, sometimes spirited, discussions, and finally she reached for her bookmark and said in that ultracasual way she had for this particular pronouncement, "I’m off to bed. If only the girls would sleep in."

  Usually he didn’t try to hold her, but tonight, for reasons obscure to him, he hated the idea of her disappearing upstairs.

  He set down his newspaper. "Before you go. I’ve been thinking. When do you go back to having the store open more than four days a week?"

  "Usually April." She closed her book. "Why?"

  "What are we going to do then?"

  "Go back to weekends?" Lynn said tentatively. "And Mondays and Tuesdays? I’m always closed on Mondays and can hire someone to cover the store on Tuesdays. Or stay closed."

  Two days here. Two there. Three apart.

  "We were unhappy when we were doing it, and we weren’t married then." He didn’t give her a chance to respond. "What about when the girls start school? Does Rose go here and Shelly in Otter Beach?"

  "I don’t know!" Her fingers clenched the book in her lap. "Is this where you suggest again that I sell the store?"

  He hadn’t meant to walk this road at all tonight, or any time in the near future, even if he could foresee the potholes ahead. He’d only wanted to keep her from going off to bed.

  But maybe they should face the problems before they arose.

  "I want you to start thinking about the future," he said evenly. "That’s all."

  "Keeping the bookstore and my own home was part of the deal." Her eyes were huge, beautiful and dark with apprehension. "You agreed."

  He tossed the newspaper aside. "Maybe at the time, neither of us was thinking about this marriage as a long-term proposition. Now I am. And I’m asking that you do, too."

  She sounded tart. "And why, all of a sudden, are you planning fifteen years ahead?"

  Evade, or tell the truth?

  Half the truth. "The kids are happy. Things are going well. Why not?"

  "Because we’re still strangers."

  Why did that hurt? "I thought we were getting past that."

  Her tongue touched her lips. "I feel as if I still know hardly anything about your past."

  "You’ve met my parents. What else is there to say?"

  “Your marriage..."

  Wariness lent a hardness to his voice. "Jennifer has been dead for three-and-a-half years. She has nothing to do with us."

  Lynn was silent for a long moment. He resisted the urge to shift under her probing gaze. At last she nodded. "Maybe you’re right." Her tone was pleasant but distant. He’d lost her, somehow.

  "I’m not trying to pressure you." Another lie.

  "I will think about the possibility of selling the store," she said, as she set her book aside and stood. "I have been already, to tell you the truth. You know I love what I do, but I also recognize that you can’t practically move to Otter Beach, and I could find work over here."

  "You could not work at all for a few years. I make plenty."

  "But then I’d feel like a kept woman," she said gently. "I know I shouldn’t. We’re married, after all, but..." An almost infinitesimal pause gave away what she was thinking: but I don’t feel married. "No," she concluded, "I need to maintain some independence."

  Adam wished he could be sure her fear was rooted in the failure of her first marriage, in the knowledge that sometimes a woman had to be able to take care of herself and her child, rather than in a lack of commitment to this marriage. He wanted to know she was in it for the long haul, too.

  Was that what he wanted? Reassura
nce?

  No, he thought, letting his gaze sweep once over her, from that mane of unruly hair to slender bare feet. He wanted everything, held out on an open palm.

  But that couldn’t be coerced.

  "Okay." Adam made his voice deliberately soothing. "You need to feel as if you’re earning your way. I don’t have a problem with that. And I’m really not trying to push you into anything. Until Shelly and Rose start kindergarten, we can probably go on this way. I’m just, uh, not looking forward to you and Shelly packing up Thursday. We feel like a family when we’re together."

  Their eyes met and she smiled with dawning warmth, although her mouth was tremulous. "We do, don’t we?"

  Then come to me, he thought. Blush. Say, "I think it’s time we take the next step."

  "Good night, Adam," she murmured, and left the room.

  He had to grit his teeth to keep from stumbling to his feet and begging, Don’t go.

  Maybe he would have noticed her, if under completely different circumstances he’d wandered into her bookstore. Heard her soft laugh and been tempted by her hair before she turned to face him. Seen a blush turn her cheeks to wild roses as her lovely, cool eyes met his.

  Groaning, Adam tried to remember Jennifer, the way she’d looked up through her lashes, the coy tilt of her head, her throaty laugh, her sultry mouth, but it was all just words, fleeting impressions. Lynn was real, vivid, here.

  Jennifer was a long-lost dream.

  Even Shelly no longer reminded him of her mother. He knew objectively that they looked alike, but his little girl had so much personality of her own that only her cheerful, endless chatter and her boldness recalled Jennifer. Perhaps when Shelly was a teenager she would bat her eyes and smile with deliberate, mysterious purpose. But for now she had Lynn’s directness and the sweetness of a much loved child.

  Not Jennifer’s hunger for attention.

  Now, where had that idea come from? he wondered, frowning, but knowing it was true. His Jenny had wanted always to be the center of attention. Her own company was never enough.

  Adam clenched his jaw. He’d loved his wife, and she was dead. Why all the analysis now?

  So he could justify letting Lynn walk into Jennifer’s place? Not just in his home and bed, but in his heart?