After That Night

by Ann Evans

FUNNY HOW in the throes of passion every woman was unique.

  In his dream Mark was with Jenna, reliving that one marvelous night in New York. There were moments that still stood out in his mind even after all these weeks, even after all that had happened. But it was her breathing he remembered most.

  The way it came hot and fast when he touched her. Those soft, frantic little nips of air she’d tried to catch when he ran his fingers slowly down her abdomen and beyond. The shivery, incredulous gasp she gave as he whispered in her ear all the things he intended to do. Lovely. Perfect. He remembered every single breath.

  And somewhere between sleep and consciousness he could hear them now. The slight whoosh of air in. Out. In. Out. Ah, Jenna. Wait for me, sweetheart.

  He was smiling when he opened his eyes—and discovered Darth Vader inches from his nose.

  Darth Vader with a pint-size body clad in pajamas printed with space ships. J.D.

  Mark blinked, tried to focus. He put his hand out, letting it fumble over the mask until he found the knob that turned off the ominous breathing sounds the toy made. “Morning,” he said in a voice that sounded rusty and thick. “Any chance you could back off a bit, Darth?”

  The kid took a couple of steps away from the couch, then tilted the mask so that it rested on the top of his head. He frowned at Mark. “Did you know you smile when you sleep? Can we have hot dogs for breakfast?”

  Mark levered himself upward. He scrubbed his face with his hands. He was a night person, and from the looks of the sunlight coming in the windows, it was barely sunup. Through the doorway he could see Pete sitting cross-legged in front of the television in the family room. The sound was turned down, but a couple of cartoon mice seemed to be busy beating the crap out of a cartoon cat.

  “Does your mother let you have hot dogs for breakfast?” Mark asked.

  “No.”

  “Then I’m guessing my answer has to be no, too.”

  “Mom’s still asleep. We left her alone, like you said last night.”

  He patted the kid’s shoulder. “Good boy,” he said with a yawn.

  J.D. moved back to join Pete. Drawing a fortifying breath, Mark went quietly upstairs to check on Jenna, as he had a couple of times during the night.

  She was still asleep. He stood beside the bed and watched her for a few moments. Those dark lashes that were longer and thicker than any woman had a right to have lay against cheeks that were pink with life now, no longer white with fear. One hand was folded under her chin. It moved infinitesimally with every breath. She looked relaxed, sweetly at peace, vulnerable. He had the undisciplined thought that he’d like to wake her with a kiss, draw her close just out of a powerful need to touch her. He wouldn’t of course. She needed the rest.

  Last night still seemed like a nightmare. Those hours in the emergency room had crawled by. It was frustrating to realize that there was so little he could do, no money he could throw at the problem, no team of experts he could browbeat into giving him quick and easy answers. Nothing.

  In many ways the baby he and Jenna had created hadn’t really existed for him until last night. Before then, it had remained a nameless, faceless challenge that would have to be dealt with sooner or later. Like a thorny business deal that wouldn’t come together until both parties sat down and worked out all the details.

  But now suddenly, crazily, everything had changed. A fierce sense of his responsibility had gripped him. The baby had become real. Because Jenna’s fear was real.

  She sighed heavily, and her lashes fluttered open. She looked up at him with a groggy, faint smile and scooted farther away, an invitation for him to sit down. He did, taking her hand so that he could brush her fingers with a kiss. Last night her flesh had been ice-cold. This morning it felt warm and supple.

  “Did I wake you?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “My internal clock. Time to get the boys ready for school.”

  “They’re up. I’ve got it covered. Hot dogs have already been vetoed for breakfast.”

  “There’s cereal in the pantry.”

  He was glad to hear it. Truthfully, he’d never tried to cook a real breakfast. That was what Mrs. Warren, his housekeeper, was for.

  She stretched an arm over her head and gave a contented sigh.

  He had to look away from her momentarily, had to pummel his senses into submission, because desire was there in an instant, hot and hard to control. “How do you feel?” he asked.

  “Rested. Like last night was just a bad dream.” She gave him a satisfied look. “I’ll get up in a minute and deal with the boys.”

  “No, you won’t. I’ll deal with them. At least for the next forty-eight hours.”

  “What? No. You can’t.”

  “I’ll try not to be insulted by your obvious lack of confidence in my ability,” he said on a short laugh. “Your family’s out of town. I’m available. What’s the problem?”

  “The problem is…” She stopped, looking frustrated.

  “You don’t want me mucking around in your life when you’re trying so hard to get me out of it,” he finished for her. “But this is doctor’s orders now. It’s two days. Not two years.”

  “I have very good friends who can help me.”

  “Who?”

  “Lauren can come over.” She frowned. “Oh, no, she can’t. She’s leaving today for a photo assignment in Maine. I’ll have to ask Vic.”

  He laughed out loud at that. “Oh, I’d like to see her with your kids. One grubby hand on her best suit, and they’ll both get banished to their room.”

  “It’s true she doesn’t like kids very much,” she admitted.

  In the end, he talked her into it, although he had to promise that he wouldn’t treat her like a complete invalid, wouldn’t hover, wouldn’t boss her around and most of all, wouldn’t hesitate to consult her if he ran into problems with the boys. He agreed to get Pete and J.D. off to school and then go to work at the Atlanta office, since there were still accounting problems to deal with. In return, she promised to stay in bed.

  “What would you like for breakfast?” He posed the question just as he was about to close her bedroom door.

  “Dry toast and milk? Maybe some fruit?”

  The way she asked made him think she didn’t have much hope that he could pull off such a simple request. He scowled at her. “You know, you’re going to feel awfully humbled when forty-eight hours are up and I’ve succeeded beautifully. There’s nothing here that I can’t handle.”

  OF COURSE, life came with certain…challenges that could make a person want to cry uncle. Mark met a couple of them that afternoon and evening.

  Up until then, he’d done really well. Pete and J.D. had helped him sort through their wardrobe. They looked presentable, if not exactly coordinated. He’d dropped them off at the elementary school with only one missed turn. He’d settled Jenna in for the day with a stack of magazines and books, bottled water and the portable television from the family room. He’d even managed a fruit salad for her lunch. Leaving the telephone number to his Atlanta office and cell phone by her bedside table, he went to the office and slapped everything into his briefcase that he planned to work on the next couple of days at Jenna’s dining-room table. He called his department heads together for a quick meeting, letting them know they could reach him by cell phone but it had better be damned important. Then he stopped off at a grocery store with a short list of items designed to please young palates.

  He was pretty proud of that particular decision. He’d considered setting up home delivery of gourmet meals with a local catering company, then decided against it. The boys probably wouldn’t eat anything that looked remotely good for them, and Jenna was likely to think he’d taken the easy way out—using cold cash to solve problems he should have been able to handle on his own.

  Later in the day he picked up Pete and J.D. after school and got them settled playing in the living room. Jenna had been sleeping every time he checked on her. Everything seemed to be on trac
k for dinner. So all in all, he thought, he’d managed things nicely.

  Then disaster hit.

  Tuesday, it seemed, was laundry day.

  Mark had never done a load of laundry in his life. No matter how screwed up his childhood might have been, he’d come from a life of privilege. He hadn’t even washed a pair of jeans in college. There were any number of girls willing to take on that chore to impress him.

  He followed J.D. into the utility room beside the kitchen. The kid had his arms full of clothes and had made it pretty clear that something needed to be done if he was going to have anything clean for peewee soccer practice.

  Mark stood before the washer and dryer, awed. He’d seen a set before, of course, but he’d never seen anything as intimidating as the Dominator Combo 2006.

  They sat there like white, bright, hulking SUVs. The 2006 had to refer to the number of dials and gauges there were between the two machines. Surely on a level with the cockpit of a jumbo jet.

  Over the top of his dirty clothes, J.D. looked up at him. “Grampa and our uncles got it for Mom last Christmas,” he explained.

  “Nice,” Mark said absently. “Where do you get in?”

  J.D. giggled, then sobered immediately. “Are you really gonna get inside?” Then looking at Mark suspiciously, he added, “Do you know how to wash clothes?”

  “No. Do you?”

  J.D. shook his head and pointed toward a shelf over the combo. Boxes and bottles, like a lineup of soldiers, stood waiting to do wash-day war. Bleaches. Brighteners. Static reducers. Things to get stains out. Things to put softness in. Mark stared at them and made a mental note to give his housekeeper a raise when he got back to Orlando.

  He took the clothes from J.D. and tossed them into the washing machine. They looked pitifully small in the cavernous tub.

  A basket of waiting laundry sat beside the washer. “Might as well make it a real load,” he told J.D., and upended those items into the machine, as well.

  The kid gasped, and his eyes went wide. “You’re gonna do all of it together?”

  Mark frowned. “Not a good idea?”

  “Mom always does a bunch of different ones. And she likes to read these.” He pulled out the tag from the back of his shirt so that Mark could see the garment-care instructions.

  Better think this through a little. He seemed to remember one of his college roommates ending up with a bunch of pink underwear because he’d forgotten to pull out a pair of red socks. He reached into the washer and removed everything he came across that was white. One of the first things he encountered was a bra, all lacy and delicate, dangling at the end of his hand like a fish on a pole.

  “Mom wears that,” J.D. told him.

  “I figured.”

  He tossed the item back into the basket, trying not to envision Jenna wearing it. And not wearing it.

  “Go find your brother,” he instructed J.D. “Tell him to get his laundry together and bring it downstairs. Quietly, so you don’t wake up your mom.”

  After the boy trooped off, Mark twisted a few of the dials on the machine. The washer growled and jerked, started dispensing water, stopped, then began ticking like a bomb. That didn’t seem like a good sign. He shut it down.

  He couldn’t let this thing get the best of him. Time to call in an expert. He yanked his cell phone out of his back pocket and punched in his housekeeper’s number, then remembered that she’d taken vacation time while he was in Atlanta.

  Time to use my second lifeline. He dialed the office in Orlando, praying that Deb hadn’t gone home yet.

  She hadn’t, God bless her. She picked up his call on the second ring.

  He didn’t waste time with greetings. “Deb! Help!”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “What do you know about doing laundry?”

  “That I hate it more than vacuuming.”

  “Ever hear of the Dominator 2006?”

  “The Cadillac of washers and dryers.”

  “I’m trying to use one.” He lifted a dusty booklet from one of the shelves, leafed through it and then tossed it back down. “I just found the instruction manual. I think it takes a degree from M.I.T. to operate this thing. Can you walk me through it?”

  Deb was great at not wasting time asking questions, but clearly she couldn’t resist revealing her shock. “You’re trying to do your own laundry? Do you have a camera around? I want a picture of that.”

  He scowled into the phone. “Just help me out here. When I turn it on, it sounds like it’s…digesting something. Or someone. I’m not kidding.” J.D. had come back and was now tugging on the tail of Mark’s shirt. “Hold on a minute,” he told Deb.

  He gave the boy his full attention, and J.D. made a face that said bad news was on the way. “Petey says you can’t order him to do anything, and he doesn’t care if his laundry gets done or not.”

  That sounded worse than trying to deal with the Dominator. Pete had been subdued this morning and even this afternoon. Mark had chalked it up to the late night or kids and their moods and left him alone, but maybe something was going on in the boy’s head that needed to be addressed.

  He returned the phone to his ear. “I’ll call you back, Deb. Do some research on this thing, will you?” She was still talking when he snapped the phone shut.

  He left J.D. carefully sorting clothes into different colors and went upstairs to the bedroom the boys shared. Spiderman vied with spaceships for opposite sides of the room. Pete was seated at the foot of his bed, his knees drawn up around his chin, a pile of dirty clothes covering his sneakers.

  Mark hunkered down on the floor facing him, then reached out to tap his knee. “As another guy, I understand liking to hang out in our favorite clothes as long as possible, but I hear Tuesday is laundry day in the Rawlins household. Want to hand those over? Or do I have to send J.D. in to blast you with his space cannon?”

  The boy tucked his face into his knees until all Mark could see was a pair of very hostile dark eyes. “You can’t tell me what to do,” Pete said in a muffled voice. “You’re not my father.”

  One thing about kids, Mark thought, they were seldom subtle. In his early years in journalism, he’d gone toe-to-toe with terrorists, the most slippery politicians, even a couple of serial killers. He realized that, right now, he would gladly have faced any of them, rather than one surly seven-year-old boy.

  He drew a breath. “No, I’m not your father. But I’m trying to help your mother. Why don’t you try helping her, too?”

  Pete’s eyes flashed hotly. “Why? It doesn’t matter. She’s just gonna die, anyway.”

  That took Mark aback. God, where had that come from? “What? Of course she’s not going to die.”

  “She could. My friend Shawn Blake told me his mother almost died when she had him, and that lots of moms die when they try to have babies they shouldn’t. You don’t go to the hospital all suddenlike unless something bad happens to you.”

  “Lots of people have to go to the emergency room,” Mark said in the most logical voice he had in his arsenal. “For a lot of different reasons. But your mother is not dying, Pete. She had a scare about the baby last night, and the doctor wants her to rest a little. That’s not the same as dying.”

  “How do you know it won’t be like that?”

  The boy sounded so full of bleak anguish that Mark reached out to touch him. Pete didn’t as much flinch away as shrink into himself. The message was clear, though. He didn’t want that kind of comfort.

  Mark had to admit he didn’t know what to do. If Jenna married him, he could give her a life free from worry and hassles. He could protect her, provide for her. He might even one day manage to conquer the Dominator.

  But he had nothing to draw from when it came to handling her children. No manuals. No cheat sheets. Not even past experience in his own family. Everything would have to be off-the-cuff. Gut instinct. Plain dumb luck. And frankly, he wasn’t sure he could trust that.

  But Pete was waiting for him to say
something. Anything. Guarantees seemed too arrogant. Promises seemed too vague. Maybe, like Jenna, the kid had a practical streak in him.

  “Well,” Mark began, trying to sound as if he’d given the matter a lot of thought, “I guess I think everything will be all right because I know that your mother’s a smart woman. She’ll do exactly what the doctor tells her. And the doctor’s smart, too. If she wasn’t, I’d get the best baby doctor in the whole country to come and see your mom.”

  Pete lifted his head a little. Mark could tell he was listening.

  “And we’re smart, too,” Mark went on. “You and me and J.D. We’ll take good care of her and not let anything bad happen. And when she has this baby, we’ll all sit around and congratulate ourselves on just how smart we were.” He ducked his head, trying to make direct eye contact. “What do you say, Pete?”

  The boy took a few moments to consider that. Then he asked, “Are you gonna be here when the baby gets born?”

  That was a path Mark didn’t want to take. Cautiously he replied, “I want to be here.”

  “J.D. isn’t really that smart,” Pete said very seriously.

  “Then it’s a good thing he has you to help him find his way.” He plucked a couple of shirts off the boy’s toes, feeling as though he’d been trying to maneuver his way through a dark cave and had just come out into the sun. “I could use a little help myself,” he said. “What do you know about that monster downstairs that washes your clothes?”

  “It’s scary.”

  “Yeah, I know. Let’s go see what we can do to tame it. Before it eats your little brother.”

  THE SECOND CRISIS came later that evening and from an unexpected source. J.D. Just when Mark was beginning to let his guard down.

  He knew he’d gotten off easy last night. The boys had been tired, so they’d been asleep on their feet by the time Mark got to their bedroom. But tonight they found a dozen excuses to delay lights-out, after an endless bath time that made wrestling an alligator seem like a walk in the park.

  Clearly both J.D. and Pete missed their mom’s presence, but Mark was determined that she wouldn’t be disturbed for such a small chore. How difficult could it be to scrub two small bodies and trot them off to bed?