A Woman Like Annie

by Inglath Cooper

  He pulled back and held her gaze for a long moment, his hand lingering on the side of her face. “This wasn’t casual for me, Annie.”

  She pressed her lips together, the words tying a knot around her heart. “Me, either.”

  “So what happens now?”

  “One day at a time?”

  He considered that, nodded once. He closed the door and stepped back.

  And Annie drove home, hopeful that this was as real as it felt.

  A STRANGE CAR SAT in the driveway of her house. Annie pulled the Tahoe in behind it, frowning. Where was Mrs. Parker’s car? This one had the generic look of a rental. Alarm threaded through her, hastening her steps up the brick walkway. She dropped her keys just as she reached the front door.

  She bent down, picked them up, and straightened to find the door open and J.D. standing on the other side. Looking as polished and magazine-perfect as J.D. always looked. The L.A. sun had lightened his hair a couple of degrees, and his face was tan against his white shirt.

  She dropped the keys again.

  He bent to pick them up this time and handed them to her.

  She took them from him with a hand responding on automatic pilot. “What are you doing here?” she asked, icicles inserting themselves in the question, even as she fought for neutrality.

  “Visiting,” he said. “Come in.”

  “Where is Mrs. Parker?”

  “I sent her home.”

  “You what?” Stunned, she stood there, feet bolted to the porch floor.

  “Didn’t see any need in her staying when I was here.”

  Outrage sent a flare to her feet, propelling her through the front door and into the living room where she turned and glared at him, hands balled into fists at her hips to prevent them from shaking. “How dare you come in this house and start issuing orders you have no right to issue?”

  He leaned a shoulder against the doorjamb, hands shoved in the pockets of his jeans, his feet bare. “It was my house, too.”

  “Was, J.D. Was.”

  “But Tommy is still my son, and I ought to have the right to spend time with him alone when I haven’t seen him in months.”

  Annie could practically feel steam emanating from her skin. “And whose fault is that?”

  He shrugged a J.D.-identifying shrug, a lift of one shoulder, a tilt of his head, and the message was the same as always: not his.

  Annie tossed her purse on the couch, folded her arms across her chest. “I’d like for you to leave, J.D.”

  “Be reasonable, Annie. It’s the middle of the night. Where would I go this late?”

  “You can sleep in your car for all I care! You are not invited to spend the night in this house.”

  He smiled. Smiled! As if he found this whole thing greatly amusing. Annie felt close to boiling.

  “You look different, babe.”

  “I let my hair grow, J.D. Now that we’ve established that change, please leave.”

  He crossed the room, not stopping until he stood bare toes to the tip of her shoes. He reached out and wound a strand of her hair around his finger. “I like it. A lot.”

  There had been a time when that look on his face, that suggestion in his voice would have toppled Annie’s anger with him. She waited now, some part of her curious. Would it still be there? Did she still need his approval, assurance that he found her attractive?

  She stepped back.

  He followed.

  “I’ve missed you, Annie.”

  “And what exactly brought that on, J.D.? Looking for a way to make your teeny-bopper girlfriend go away?”

  “You didn’t used to be sarcastic.”

  “No, but I used to be a lot of other things. Naive, for one.”

  “So I’ve made you jaded, is that it?”

  “That would mean you have power over me, J.D. And you do not. You do not.”

  “Really?” He stepped forward again, following her until she reached the wall behind her. His arms made brackets on either side of her. He leaned in until his face was inches from hers. “Like to prove it?”

  He was going to kiss her. She bridled at the idea. But something inside her said, okay, prove it. Are you really and truly over him? Show him. Show yourself.

  He leaned in, tested her mouth with a quick kiss. She didn’t respond. He looked down at her with a raised eyebrow. Then leaned in again, his mouth taking hers in a kiss of another kind, just as he had obviously taken her silence as acquiescence.

  When, in actuality, it had been consideration. Appraisal of her own reaction. Or the absence of one.

  And suddenly, she recognized his kiss for what it was. What it had always been. Practiced. Perfected. Mechanical to her now. J.D.’s kisses had always had a purpose. Don’t be mad at me, Annie. I won’t do it again.

  Her thoughts turned to another kiss. Another man whose touch had felt like something else altogether. Not practiced. Not even perfect. Too imbued with what had felt like genuine need to care whether their noses bumped.

  The only genuine need in J.D.’s kisses was that behind whatever his current agenda was. And he always had one. Always.

  Annie pulled back, turned her head away. “J.D., stop.”

  “Annie, sweet Annie, I’ve missed you. And Tommy.” His lips found her neck, gave it a teasing nip.

  “Stop,” she said and pushed him away.

  It was not the response he’d been hoping for. His expression said so clearly. This was his hurt-little-boy face, the one he’d always pulled out whenever he thought he had a pretty good chance of changing her mind.

  She had news for him: this time it wasn’t going to work.

  “Please, leave, J.D. You can come back in the morning, and we’ll talk.”

  “Okay, I can understand you’re not going to forgive me so easily. I’m willing to work at it.”

  “There’s nothing to work at. What do I have to say to make you understand that?”

  He dropped into the leather chair by the fireplace. “If that’s how you want it, Annie, then here’s the deal. I want my son back. In my life every day. The choices are pretty clear. Either we get back together, and we both have him, or we don’t, and I’ll find a way to make a court see that he should be with me.”

  ANNIE GAVE IN AND let J.D. stay in the guest room. The night was half over anyway, and she was too shell-shocked by the ultimatum he’d just given her to put up much of an argument.

  After checking on Tommy, she’d gone to her room—locking the door—washed her face and put on pajamas. She climbed in bed and sat with her back to the headboard, her heart throwing itself against the wall of her chest.

  J.D. had lost his mind. That had to be it. There was no other explanation for what had just happened.

  She waited to feel something, anything, but there was just this awful numbness inside her, leeching outward until even her fingers and toes felt brittle with it. Her thoughts chased one another in circles, leading nowhere.

  What would she have said had he come back a year ago, six months ago? Would she have forgiven him? Wanted him back?

  Be honest, Annie. Would you?

  Probably. There, that was honest.

  She couldn’t say for sure what her true motivation would have been—some leftover morsel of love for him, a desire to put their family back together again, or maybe pride and simply that, unadmirable though it was.

  But now, she felt none of those things. They just weren’t there anymore, like words on a blackboard, erased, gone.

  And Jack. There was Jack. Jack, who made her laugh. Who asked her opinion as if the weighing of it were crucial in whatever decision he happened to be making. Who looked at her with eyes that reflected someone she had never imagined herself being to a man like Jack.

  She had to believe he had come into her life for a reason. It was her nature to look at life’s plot that way, put logic to what might otherwise be seen as coincidental, circumstantial, paths that appeared to veer off into confusing tangles having direction and desti
nation all along. That did not mean she was presumptuous enough, confident enough, to assume there would be anything lasting in their temporary collision, of course.

  But from it, she had already had her eyes opened to a few life-altering things. Yes, maybe a year ago she would have weakened to J.D.’s demand that they put their marriage back together. Come to the eventual conclusion that it would be best for Tommy, that maybe J.D. really would have changed this time. But not now. Now, she was someone different from the woman he’d married, a young, starstruck, I’ll-make-him-happy wife who’d beaten her head against the wall of a doomed-from-the-start marriage until she’d come to see the resulting bruises as just part of her normal complexion.

  A person didn’t have to live that way. Shouldn’t live that way. She hadn’t been a perfect wife. There was no such thing, she was sure, and she certainly would never have nominated herself for the title. But she had tried. Tried a thousand different ways to make J.D. see her as enough. Enough of a wife that maybe respect alone would keep him from straying. Enough of a lover that his eyes did not inevitably stray to the prettiest woman in the room at parties. But they did. Always. And she knew now, if she had never accepted it before, that they always would.

  Something else, she knew now, too, though. This wasn’t her fault. She was woman enough, pretty enough, for someone. Not J.D., maybe. But the reason for that she no longer laid at her own doorstep. J.D.’s roving libido was the result of a flaw in him. Not her. And for years, she had believed the opposite to be true.

  So maybe that was the reason Jack had been put in her path. To show her a reflection of herself she had not allowed herself to see before. She liked who she was with him. A woman who laughed and made laughter. A woman who flirted and was flirted with.

  So what did all of this mean?

  It meant that J.D. no longer had power over her. The only reason he ever had was that she had given it to him. Had allowed him to treat her as someone unworthy of respect and fidelity. The thought was freeing in that it was completely within her control to never allow it to happen again. Why was it that something so seemingly simple had remained elusive to her for the duration of her marriage?

  The reason was simple. Because she had not wanted to see it. Had wanted, instead, to believe herself unworthy of those things.

  She was a different woman now. Had proved to herself that she did not need J.D. to exist. That she was perfectly capable of making a life for Tommy and her that was full and fulfilling.

  This time she would not bend. She was not giving up her son. Would fight him like a tigress whose cub was being threatened. And she was not going to allow J.D. to bully his way back into her life.

  He had waged this particular battle with the advantage of surprise. Much as he had the end of their marriage. And while it was tempting to march down the hall, order him out of the house and out of her life, this was not a war she intended to lose, and for that she would need strategy. Strategy did not allow for the luxury of indignation.

  The first thing she had to do was set things right with her sister. Now, like so many other times in her life, she was going to need her.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  JACK COULD NOT SLEEP. Sleep had never been a problem for him. He could close his eyes in any airport, on any train, and be out in two minutes.

  But not tonight.

  Tonight, he couldn’t get his mind off Annie. Or the memory of her upstairs in his bed.

  Restlessness paced through him, its footsteps too loud to ignore. So he got up and tried outpacing it, roaming room to room in the big old house. But it followed, and he finally ended up in his father’s study, with its now subtle clues of Joshua Corbin’s once-daily presence: the pipe he’d smoked in the evenings with its cherry-flavored tobacco, the shelves of books on one wall, the spines still bookstore new, but the pages within dog-eared and well-read.

  Jack reached up, pulled a book from the shelf, glanced at the title on the cover. It wasn’t something he’d ever heard of, but his father’s taste in books had run toward the adventuresome, tales of pioneer treks across unforgiving mountain ranges and the hurdles to be cleared before making a home on the other side.

  He sat down in the leather chair by the window, flicked on the floor lamp beside it. He opened the book, met in the first paragraph the story’s young heroine, but his thoughts strayed, unfaithful, to another woman.

  Annie.

  He let the book drop forward and find a resting spot against his chest. He closed his eyes and replayed the night. Saw the two of them traipsing through the woods, Annie on his back, legs and arms wrapped around him as if he were the last safe haven in the path of a killer storm.

  The appeal of that hit him like the sharp crack of a whip.

  Annie struck chords never before played inside him. Made him feel things he’d never felt before.

  Making love to her had been like rediscovering the experience for the first time. With Annie, everything felt like the first time. With all the excitement and uncertainty that go with it.

  Sitting there in his father’s study, Jack knew he had found the woman with whom he wanted to spend his life. Knew it in the farthest reaches of heart and soul, in that place where the deepest truths make themselves known.

  Annie was the woman he’d never imagined meeting. Never imagined wanting in a way that told him his life was never going to be the same without her in it.

  He could list a dozen reasons why it would never work. They didn’t live in the same place…he was supposed to start a new project in London as soon as he tied things up here…she’d been hurt by a man who had not appreciated her for the woman she was….

  But Jack closed his mind to them all. Somehow, he knew there was no roadblock he couldn’t figure out how to get them around. He’d just take them on one by one and see where they led.

  CLARICE CRACKED AN EYE at her alarm clock. Nearly nine. Darn, she’d overslept. No wonder, though, since it had been nearly four before she’d managed to fall asleep. She got up, flopped downstairs to make coffee in a posture her mother would have once called sulky. Clarice considered herself a big enough woman to admit her mother would have been right. For two days now, that was exactly what she’d been doing: sulking.

  She scooped some beans out of the container in the freezer, put them in the coffee grinder. She’d spent all of last night simmering in front of the TV. Stoking her indignation like a campfire she refused to let go out, using, as kindling, her own well-justified arguments as to having voiced right up front her intentions where Jack Corbin was concerned.

  The downside about being mad at her sister was that she was the one person Clarice would have liked to call up and complain to about it.

  The doorbell rang. She swung back through the kitchen to answer it, not caring that she hadn’t yet brushed her hair or removed the mascara from beneath her eyes. On the front porch stood Annie, arms folded across her chest in a stance that said okay-let’shave-it-out.

  “Annie,” Clarice said, eyes widening.

  “Okay, let’s have it out,” Annie said and marched past her into the kitchen.

  Whoa. Clarice trailed after her.

  Annie went straight to the coffeepot, poured herself a cup and sipped at it, her eyes lasering in on Clarice over the rim. “You’ve been avoiding me,” she said. “Not taking my calls. Don’t you think it’s time we dealt with this?”

  Clarice’s jaw went slack. Annie had never spoken to her this way. She was the one who ought to be in the driver’s seat. She was the one whose pride had been injured. With an indifference she didn’t quite feel at the moment, Clarice eased across the kitchen floor and poured herself a cup of coffee. “I never imagined you as capable of being underhanded.”

  “Underhanded?”

  “I think leading me to believe you weren’t interested in Jack when you really were seems a little underhanded.”

  “Clarice, I wasn’t.”

  “Aren’t?”

  Annie looked down. “I didn’t m
ean to be.”

  Clarice’s heart did a little dip. “So why couldn’t you just admit you wanted him?”

  “Clarice.” Annie deflated, as if someone had stuck a pin in the dukes-in-the-air determination she’d sailed in on. The look on her face told Clarice everything she needed to know. No matter what Annie said from this point forward, Clarice knew her sister. She was in love with Jack. No question about it.

  “So this is my payback for Craig Overby, huh?”

  Annie glanced up, visibly surprised by the name. “You’ve never mentioned him once in all these years.”

  “Maybe I was too ashamed. I was a bad sister. You had already staked that claim.”

  “And you think I’ve been a bad sister now?”

  Clearly, there were two roads Clarice could take from here. High or low. There were times when she had taken advantage of her sister’s dislike of conflict between them. Used it to come out the winner of whatever it was they were at odds over. She could have done it this time as well. Annie was that loyal. Selfishness died an unwilling death inside her, sending out a last flare of reason: You wanted him, though!

  True, she had.

  But the truth had not changed. He wasn’t interested in her. He was interested in Annie. Painful as it was to admit. She sighed and said, “Oh, Annie, I’ve been a total boar’s behind.”

  Relief danced across Annie’s face like sunshine. “Well, maybe not quite that bad.”

  “Close enough for comparison. So this makes us even on the whole Craig thing, right?”

  Now Annie laughed. She crossed the kitchen floor, put her arms around Clarice and hugged her. “You know I think you walk on water.”

  The words filled Clarice with warmth and gratitude. She was lucky to have a baby sister who simply loved her for who she was. She’d been foolish to take it for granted. “I’m sorry, Annie.”

  “I’m sorry, Clar.”

  They hugged each other for a long grateful moment, and when they pulled back, Clarice swiped at a tear on her cheek. “I guess I’ve just started to feel a little desperate. Like I’m never going to meet anyone I could spend the rest of my life with. Have children with.”