by JoAnn Ross
“No. Of course I wouldn’t.” She didn’t sound as if she entirely meant that. Which was a good thing. Wasn’t it?
“I was coming back from seeing Pops,” he said.
“So early in the morning?” She knew what time he got off work, which meant she also knew that he wouldn’t have gotten much sleep. What she didn’t need to know was that thanks to her bedeviling both his mind and his body, he hadn’t gotten any. “Is something wrong?”
“No. Not with him, anyway. A close friend he was in the war with died. I wanted to break the news before he heard it from anyone else. He wants me to take him to the memorial service tomorrow, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed that he’ll be having a good day when I show up in the morning.”
“I’ll keep mine crossed as well, for both of you,” she said. “I assume you’re talking about Ollie Nelson?”
Okay, that was a surprise. “How did you guess that?”
“Your grandfather talks about Ollie. A lot. Especially when we’re working on his war scrapbook.”
“What war scrapbook?”
“He hasn’t shown it to you?” She sounded as surprised as he’d been to hear about it.
“No. I didn’t even know it existed.” How coincidental was it that he’d just been thinking he needed to get Pops’ stories down? Apparently Charlie had already been working on that. With Annie Shepherd.
Which meant she knew really personal stuff about his grandfather that none of his family did. And how weird was that?
“The only ones I’ve ever seen are the family one and the new one you just started about his activities at Still Waters, like the aquarium field trip. Today, when I got there, he was sitting in the garden looking at the photo of my grandmother on their honeymoon.”
“Ah, the one at Rainbow Lake. I love that one,” Annie said. The smile in her voice had him picturing the one that would be shining in her eyes. “She reminds me of a 1940s cover girl. Like Rita Hayworth.”
“Nailed it,” Mac agreed as the damn clock he was beginning to hate ticked down. “I guess he told you about rowing across the lake.”
“And stopping in the middle? Yes, he wasn’t specific regarding the details, but I got the idea.”
“We talked about you, too.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah. He told me to seize the carp. Not that you’re a carp, but—”
“I get the point. Especially since he told me the same thing. About you.”
“So.” He blew out a breath. “Here we are.”
“It appears so.”
“And, if that song is to be believed, it’s up to me to make the next move.”
“I called you,” she reminded him. “Again.”
“Good point. So, laying my ego out there on the line, here’s where I tell you that you’ve gotten under my skin, Annie Shepherd. I think about you. A lot.” Like most of the time. “Maybe too much.”
“I think about you, too.”
“But?”
“We agreed to be grown-ups.”
“True. But I damn well don’t remember agreeing to be a monk. And last time I heard, you hadn’t joined a convent.”
“No.” Her soft laugh of approaching surrender hit him in the gut. And lower. Yes, he was definitely getting to her. The same way she’d already gotten to him.
“We already agreed to be friends,” he reminded her. “So what’s wrong with seeing each other socially?”
“Socially? Like a date?”
“I know you keep saying you’ve given up men,” he said. “But you don’t seem to be real invested in that plan. So maybe you’re just out of practice.”
There was another pause. Longer than the first. The clock was down to thirty seconds.
Just when Mac thought he was going to have to cut her off, and hey, wouldn’t that win him a lot of points, she said, “After you take Charlie back to Still Waters tomorrow, give me a call. If you have time, I’ll take the afternoon off and fix you a late lunch at my place.”
Was she actually talking about a nooner?
Ten seconds.
Or, in this case, maybe a lunch was just a lunch.
Five seconds, and no time to investigate further.
“It’s a deal,” he said, just an instant before time ran out.
“You’re tuned in to KBAY ninety-eight-point-six Mac at Midnight and we had ourselves some technical difficulties that screwed up the phone lines,” he lied deftly as he went back on the air. “But I think we’ve got that situation fixed, so lines are now open.
“Question for the night being, Who’s supposed to make the first move? The guy? Or the woman?
“While you’re dialing, here’s Sugarland, with “What I’d Give,” a tune about a friend wanting to be more. Switch genders and it works just as well because I’ll bet a lot of guys have found themselves in that situation, too. So let’s throw that into the conversational mix.”
Mac hit Play, rocked back in his chair, and as he watched the lines start to flash, he hoped Annie would get the message that while he was willing to settle for friendship, his ultimate plan was for a whole lot more.
35
The minute the hot, plaintive Sugarland song ended, the phone rang. Although Annie hadn’t really expected Mac to call her with all the other people undoubtedly wanting to talk to him, she experienced a little stab of disappointment when she saw Sedona’s name on the caller ID.
“So?” Sedona asked. “What did you guys talk about that had him move things to the next level?”
“We’re negotiating levels,” Annie insisted.
“You’re not going to be able to hold things at the status quo,” Sedona predicted. “Don’t forget, I’ve seen you together. Even if Kim hadn’t reported that kiss in the shop, the chemistry between you two had electricity sparking all over the restaurant. I was afraid you’d blow the circuit breakers.”
“I invited him over to the house for a late lunch tomorrow.”
“You do have condoms, right? Just in case he doesn’t come prepared to dress for the occasion?”
“We’re not having sex.”
About this Annie was perfectly clear. Oh, she wasn’t certain it wouldn’t eventually happen. But tomorrow was about conversation. And, okay, even if she swore ahead of time it wasn’t going to happen, there’d probably be more kisses.
But maybe once he heard what she had to say, he wouldn’t want to kiss her again. “I’m having him over so I can explain why we can’t ever have a long-term relationship.”
“You’re not the type of woman to just have a fling,” Sedona said.
“Maybe I’ve been thinking about what you said about being proactive. As long as we keep things casual, it could work.”
“Maybe.” Sedona sounded skeptical. “I don’t suppose you’d care to share with me why any deeper relationship is out of the question?”
Along with Mac Culhane taking up so much of her thoughts lately, Annie had been considering Sedona’s accusation that she didn’t share personal aspects of her life like true friends did. And, of all the women in Shelter Bay, Sedona was Annie’s closest friend.
“Okay.” She blew out a breath. It wasn’t as if she’d been unfaithful or anything. “Let me run downstairs and get some wine.”
“Are we going to need alcohol for this conversation?”
“Maybe you won’t,” Annie said. “But I’ve only recently admitted to myself the full picture of what happened to me. I’m not sure saying it out loud is going to be all that easy.”
After retrieving the bottle she’d opened earlier, she crawled back beneath the sheets, dislodging a grumpy Pirate, who, as soon as she’d left the bedroom, had settled on her pillow.
She poured a glass and took a sip, hoping it would settle her nerves. It didn’t. After all this time, it still hurt.
“You know I
’ve always wanted children,” she began.
“Of course.”
“And that my husband was older.”
“And that he was your boss who had children older than you,” Sedona said. “What does that have to do with Midnight Mac? Or any other man you might be attracted to?”
“A lot of people thought that I married Owen because he was rich and powerful and I wanted to live that Washingtonian lifestyle.”
“No one who truly knows you could ever think that.“
“Thanks. Because that’s true. I didn’t want the wealth, or all the charity lunches and dinners with people I had nothing in common with. Or the Fairfax County stone mansion with the closet this bedroom could fit into. All filled with designer clothes and shoes.”
“Okay. I have to admit I’m lusting after the shoes,” Sedona said. “Not that there’s anywhere to wear them in Shelter Bay, but still . . .
“So, you married for love.”
“No,” Annie admitted. “Oh, I thought I did. But I was twenty-two, barely out of college, and after a lifetime of moving from place to place, I’ve belatedly realized that Owen represented security.”
“That makes perfect sense,” Sedona agreed.
“I hated that house,” Annie admitted. “It was so large we had a live-in housekeeper, along with a maid and a gardener, so I never felt as if we had any privacy. But it did have all those bedrooms—”
“Which you intended to fill with babies.”
“Yes.” Annie smiled softly at her youthful naiveté. “But when I hadn’t gotten pregnant the first year, the doctor told me I needed to relax. And suggested I drink a glass of wine before sex.”
“A male doctor, no doubt,” Sedona said dryly. “A woman probably would’ve also looked for a physical cause.”
“We tried for two years,” she said. “Finally, although looking back on it, I can see that Owen was quite satisfied with how things were, he also wanted, in his way, to make me happy. So I went to a fertility specialist.
“And here’s a little sidebar. When I was thirteen, I had these horrible pains in my lower side for days, which my foster mother at the time kept writing off as me merely whining about menstrual cramps.”
“You’re the least whiny person I know,” Sedona said supportively.
“Well, she felt differently, so finally, after a week, my appendix ruptured.”
“I hope the State took her license away. It’d be lovely if she was also sent to prison for child neglect, but that probably didn’t happen.”
“I don’t even know if she lost her license,” Annie admitted. “Because when I got out of the hospital a week later, I was moved to a different home. . . .
“Anyway, I had a diagnostic hysterosalpingogram, which showed that my fallopian tubes were too scarred from the surgery for my eggs to be able to make it through to meet Owen’s little swimmers. Fortunately, since money was no problem, I talked Owen into IVF treatment.”
“That’s supposed to be tough to go through.”
“It wasn’t easy.” Just the memory had Annie taking another drink. “After the first try didn’t take, Owen told me that he hated the entire process. That it had made me seem more like some sort of wannabe incubator than a woman.”
“Lovely guy, Owen. No wonder he’s an ex.”
“I didn’t leave then,” Annie said. “For the next couple years, even as his daughters both had children, which, believe me, wasn’t easy to watch, especially since they didn’t bother to hide how much they resented me, I threw myself into becoming the perfect D.C. society hostess.”
Apparently Annie wasn’t the only one drinking, because she heard a spewing noise on the other end of the phone, and then Sedona began coughing.
“Sorry,” she said. “I know it must have been a wretched time for you, and I’m sure you must have been a dynamite hostess, but I’m having a really difficult time envisioning you in that lifestyle. And I like to think I have a pretty good imagination.”
“That makes two of us. At least, unlike the political parties, the charity work was for good causes, but it still didn’t fill that hole I had inside me.”
“The one needing to be filled with kids,” Sedona, who’d professed not to even want children, said sympathetically.
“That one,” Annie agreed. “Knowing how many children need homes, I was seriously considering adoption, but every time I’d bring it up, Owen would have a reason why it wasn’t a good time.”
“I’m disliking this guy more and more,” Sedona muttered.
“He’s not as bad as I’m making him out to sound,” Annie insisted. “Perhaps a bit passive-aggressive on the issue.”
“Jeez, you think?”
“Anyway, as I got near my thirtieth birthday, I decided to give myself a present that meant more than the diamond necklace and matching earrings he had his assistant buy, and I made an appointment for the two of us with an adoption agency counselor.
“I wasn’t certain he’d even show up for the meeting, but he did, which was a positive sign. Until he finally told me, flat out, in front of the counselor, that having already raised one family, he had no desire to begin again.”
“And that’s when you left.”
“No.” How foolish had that been? “I stayed for another year.”
“Why?”
“You have to understand. Owen was the only real family I’d ever known. Even if we didn’t have my fantasy family, I was determined to make it work.” She sighed heavily and took another long sip of wine. “But I could tell he’d already emotionally moved on. Then one Sunday morning he surprised me with a date for brunch at the Hay-Adams.
“At first I thought that maybe he’d decided to try to bring a little romance back into our lives, but no sooner than our mimosas were served, he told me that he’d fallen in love with someone else.”
“Damn. The bastard took you somewhere public he knew you couldn’t make a scene.” Ironically, Sedona sounded angrier than Annie herself had been at the time.
“Which shows how little he knew me,” she murmured. “Because I don’t make scenes.” She never had, having watched what happened to foster kids who got put on the “troublesome” list.
“I would’ve wanted to start throwing china. Which,” the other woman admitted, “as much as it would’ve killed me to play the lady, I probably wouldn’t have.”
“No. You wouldn’t.” Annie blew out a breath, relieved to finally get this story out. “I moved out of the house, which I’d never liked, our long-overdue divorce was as cold, dry, and unemotional as our marriage, and less than two months after it was finalized, he and his new trophy wife appeared in the Lifestyle section of the Washington Post.”
And in her former husband’s circle, it was as if she’d never existed. Something Annie was used to, having moved from home to home, family to family.
“Since I no longer had any connection to the capital, I decided to start over again as far away as I could. I’d grown up here in Oregon, so it made sense to begin with it as a destination point. And, as you pointed out, Shelter Bay is on the edge of the continent and as different from the inside-the-Beltway vibe as you can get. So I moved here, opened Memories on Main, and am happy with how things worked out.”
“I’m truly sorry about the baby thing, but glad you managed to come out of all that happy. You still need to get laid, though,” Sedona said.
Which made Annie laugh. Another reason they were friends.
“Same back at you,” she countered. Then she thought about those kisses on the bridge and the beach. “And maybe I will. As soon as I can figure out how to look at sex as just another recreational activity and not a prelude to something deeper.”
“I still don’t see what the problem is,” Sedona insisted. “I’m having an even more difficult time with it now that I know about your marriage breaking up over kids.
You want a child. Mac Culhane has a child. That balances out nicely.”
“Once a CPA, always a CPA,” Annie said. “It’s not all about checks and balances and bottom lines. There’s a very good chance he’ll want a brother or sister for Emma.”
“And an equally good possibility that he won’t. I’m an only child,” she reminded Annie. “And look how good I turned out.
“Besides, even if he does want another child, you’ve already said you were considering adoption. Which, may I point out, has turned out wonderfully for Charity and Gabe. You’d never know that Johnny and Angel weren’t their birth children. Having watched Mac with Emma, I’d bet he’d be totally open to adoption.”
“This conversation is making my brain hurt.” Unlike all her ones with Midnight Mac, which made all the other vital parts of her body ache.
“You just need to relax,” Sedona said. “Nothing like some hot sex with a hard body to release endorphins. Try thinking of Midnight Mac as yet another important part of a healthy lifestyle.”
With last bit of advice, she hung up.
Just the thought of getting naked with the man set off an all too familiar hot rush of desire.
Setting the empty wineglass on the table, she lay back on the pillow she’d reclaimed from Pirate, who immediately climbed on top of her legs, and closed her eyes, trying to practice the meditation techniques Sedona had taught them all late one night during a sixties-video-watching party at Kara’s. At the time Maddy had been suffering from unfulfilled lust for Lucas, and like Elizabeth Taylor’s Maggie the Cat, she’d spent a lot of time pacing the floor.
But even as Annie struggled to calm her body, her restless mind kept spinning. She’d never been good at living in the now, since the now had always been so unstable and fleeting. Having developed the habit of looking ahead, trying to garner control over an unknown future, maybe she was making too big a deal of this situation.
So what if whatever she had going with Mac didn’t lead to a happily-ever-after ending?
That didn’t mean she couldn’t just do what probably any other woman in her circumstances would do: Go with the flow, enjoy the moment, and the very hot man.