“Good night, Mermaid,” he whispered.
As she stood by her open window, she heard his car door thud shut and then heard him drive off. Loneliness descended upon her soul, and she quickly peeled off her clothes, got ready for bed, and slid gratefully between the sheets. She drew the covers up around her shoulders, closed her eyes, and let sleep come over her in a huge, dark wave, not waking until she felt Amber’s soft touch on her face.
“You were having a happy dream, weren’t you, Mom? You were smiling while you slept.”
Jillian gathered her daughter close and pulled her under the covers with her.
“A very happy dream, my darling.”
“What was it about, Mom? A handsome prince?”
“Nope,” she lied. “It was about a lucky mom and her beautiful daughter who are going to have the best picnic ever today.”
“I know!” Amber’s face glowed. “Oh, Mom, it’s going to be so much fun! I wanted to wake you up ages ago, but instead we just sat around talking about all the fun we’re going to have, and where we’ll go, and what we’ll do, and that’s almost as much fun as doing it will be. We’ve made all sorts of plans and there’s enough food for ten people, Grandma says.”
Jillian felt bad. Her mother hated picnics, and she’d had no idea she planned to go with them. Besides, Jillian was the one who had promised Amber this treat, so it seemed unfair that her mother should be the one to have spent the morning preparing for it. Her mother deserved a day off. She deserved far more than just one day off a week, in fact. As she had said to Mark, her mother deserved a life of her own.
Amber allowed her no more time for thinking of such things. She initiated a tickling match which culminated in the two of them tumbling off the bed rolled in the fluffy comforter. Amber escaped with a great deal more agility than her mother.
“Come on, Mom, get up,” she said impatiently, tugging at the corner of the quilt, hindering Jillian in her attempts to extricate herself. “You get showered and dressed, and I’ll go make sure Mark has enough coffee. He said he needed lots this morning because he didn’t get much sleep last night. Hurry!”
“Amber!”
Jillian made a dive after her daughter and missed as she swung open the door.
Still half-wrapped the comforter on the floor, she sat there staring up at the tall man in the doorway. Suddenly she became vitally aware that the pale aqua nightgown she wore barely covered her to the tops of her thighs and was nothing but sheer lace across the upper curves of her breasts and that it was held up only by tiny straps, one of which had slipped down and was in danger of allowing that side of the top to fall right off.
She felt the heat of his eyes on her, and her heart began to hammer in the way only he could make it do. She knew that he could see her nipples jutting out like hard little berries and that only made them pucker more tightly. A wild, pounding sensation began between her thighs and dizziness assailed her.
Pulling the comforter all the way over her legs and high under her chin, she swallowed hard and moistened her dry lips with the tip of her tongue. “What is going on?” she whispered, her eyes fixed on his face. “What are you doing here?”
As if sensing that her mother might be going to send her new playmate away, Amber ran to him and took his hand, clinging to it tightly, holding her breath as she waited for Jillian’s verdict. Jillian tore her gaze from her daughter’s hope-filled face and looked again at the man.
A warm expression began in Mark’s eyes, spread to crinkle their corners, then to bracket his firm mouth with deep creases as he smiled.
“What am I doing here?” he said. “Enjoying the scenery. Do I dare to hope that those are your favorite picnic clothes, Mermaid? Or didn’t you remember there was a picnic planned for today? And,” he said proudly, “I even packed the basket myself so you don’t have a thing to do.”
For another long moment she could only look at him, wondering if she were going mad, because never had such joy flooded her spirits, never had she wanted to share a day with someone the way she wanted to share this day with the two people who now stood hand in hand before her. Suddenly she laughed. “I thought your medium was the barbecue. And we like sandwiches for our picnics.” She looked stern and said, “Tell me the menu, and then I’ll decide.”
But they both knew she already had decided, and that even if the menu was fried ice and clothes pins, she was going on that picnic.
“I’ll get dressed,” she said.
“I was afraid of that,” he murmured softly.
He smiled when she returned in jeans and a skimpy T-shirt, her feet stuffed into grubby sneakers, and her long hair tied back with a green scarf that matched her shirt and her eyes.
“Chris!” she said, surprised to see Mark’s son with him. “This is great! I didn’t know you were here too.”
He shrugged and scuffed one toe into the dirt. “Dad said I had to.”
“Well, thank goodness for that,” Jillian said, taking his hand and Amber’s. “How could we have enjoyed our picnic if you weren’t along?” He allowed her to hold his hand for only a minute before he pulled away and marched for the door, head down. Mark followed him, saying, “Ladies, let’s go. It’s picnic time.”
A canvas-topped Jeep was parked outside, and Jillian wondered just how many vehicles the man owned. She strapped Amber into the backseat beside Chris, on a booster seat he’d thoughtfully provided, placed Mark’s picnic basket and the extra clothes and the blanket which she had thought to bring, around their feet, then clambered up beside Mark. She looked back and waved at her mother, who sat in a rocker on the porch, a book on her lap.
As he stopped at the end of the street, she put her hand on his wrist. “We have a special place we go that no one else seems to know about. Amber, would you mind if we took Chris and Mark there?”
“No, Mom, I don’t mind. I’d like that!” Amber agreed with enthusiasm, grinning at Chris who looked at her as if she were some kind of interesting, but probably harmless insect.
Mark smiled. “I’d like that, too, and thank you for wanting to share a special place with new friends. Just point me in the right direction.”
The picnic was a success. The food was good and plentiful and Jillian pronounced the menu “just right,” an approval that made Mark beam as he handed her a crisp, green apple. They ate lunch sitting by a stream that babbled as Amber did. Her daughter’s delight in their guests and Mark’s keen humor as he bantered with her made Jillian smile. She wished there was something she could do to put Christ at ease. Luckily, she hit upon butterflies as a topic of conversation, discovered he had an avid interest in collecting them. But while he talked willingly to her, he addressed his father only when necessary. Then, while Amber and Mark and Chris splashed and waded in the cold water of creek, Jillian sat on the bank watching their antics.
When Mark declared his feet were numb he got out. Chris had left earlier to sit near Jillian and Amber felt abandoned.
“Mom, come and wade,” she said, and when her mother refused, Amber looked sulky, then thoughtful. Darting out of the cold water, she hunkered on Jillian’s other side and whispered in her ear, “Are you ’barrassed because of Mark and Chris, Mom?”
Jillian hugged Amber’s shoulders. “Maybe a little, hon.”
“Mark wouldn’t mind. He’s nice. I like him, Mom.”
“I like him, too, punkin, and maybe you’re right, he wouldn’t mind. But I would.”
Jillian looked over at Mark, who had discovered a laden huckleberry bush and was filling a plastic tumbler with the delicious little red morsels—those that made it past his mouth, she noticed.
Mark saw her looking at him. “What are you two whispering about over there?” he called, his face alight with laughter. He knew perfectly well they were talking about him. Otherwise why would they have bothered to whisper?
“Girl talk,” she answered, and leaned back with her legs stretched out in front of her, feeling the heat of the sun on the top of her head mak
ing her eyelids heavy.
Before she could fall asleep she got up, insisting they go for a walk.
“The bouncy tree, the bouncy tree,” Amber said eagerly, bouncing already, and they set off across a patch of thick, damp moss that rose over their ankles. All four of them sat astride the low, bent dead branch of a cedar tree, bouncing hard on the springy limb.
Squished between Mark and Chris, Jillian felt as if her body was about to burst into flames. She couldn’t move away from him unless she wanted risk pushing Chris, who in turn might shove right off the broken end of the branch. Mark sat so close to her because, as he murmured, he thought they were all in danger of falling off, but somehow, as his arms locked around her middle, holding her as closely as she held Chris, as Chris held Amber, she doubted there was even the slightest chance of anyone falling—not with Mark as their anchor. For several moments, she gave in to the temptation to lean her head back against his shoulder, but that encouraged him to place his lips at the corner of her mouth. It did such startling things to her insides, she had to lift her head. She wanted off the bouncy branch. She wanted out of Mark’s embrace.
And she wanted what was happening to go on forever.
But finally even Amber’s indefatigable legs gave out, and they were allowed to rest in the shade for several minutes before tackling a bluff that Chris wasn’t at all certain they should try to climb. “Jillian’s got a sore leg,” he said to his father in the surly tone he reserved for him. “She’s been limping all day. Haven’t you noticed?”
“It’s okay, Chris,” Jillian said, “but thanks for thinking of me.” She started up the bluff with Amber right in front of her. “It’s a permanent limp, but it doesn’t stop me from doing anything I want to do.”
Oh no? she asked herself, glancing over her shoulder at Mark. Doesn’t it?
Mark caught her glance and wondered briefly what it meant. He slowed down, holding back to watch the beautiful curve of her hips and thighs as she moved away from him up the bluff, finding food and hand-holds in crevices, rising from one rounded, mossy outcropping to another. She was as easy to watch on land as she was in the water and he wondered if she had any idea of just how he’d begun to feel about her.
And, he asked himself, exactly how was that? He didn’t know, but when he wasn’t with her, he wanted to be. He wanted touch her all the time, to smell her skin, to feel her close to him, to hear the sound of her laughter. He wanted to be able to take her into his arms and kiss her every time he saw her instead of having to share her with others, especially the men at the club.
Again, he recognized jealousy in himself and didn’t like it. He was acting more like a man of twenty than one of forty.
Well, as a practical man of forty, he decided, he should be able to work things out logically and sensibly. All he had to do was put his mind to it. There was a solution to this dilemma he found himself in, and it was up to him to solve it.
Jillian sat between the two kids when he circled around and came down behind them and crouched, looking down at the top of her golden head. The aromas of cedar and earth and moss clung to her and mingled with the fresh scent that was all her own. He put his hands on her shoulders, feeling the warmth of her skin through her blouse, lifting his face to the salty wind that blew strongly from the direction of the ocean, which they could see from the top of the bluff but the only solution he could come up with to the problems that beset him was to take her in his arms and kiss the living daylights out of her. Only, how could he, with two innocent children looking on. Damn, but she was getting to him.
“Look at that little boat go!” Amber said, standing up as a small aluminum boat bounced along, slapping across the wave tops. “Oh, I’d love to do that, Mom! Look at those ladies with their hair blowing back. I’d like to go that fast.”
“But look at the men with their baseball caps turned around backwards,” Mark said, giving the brim of Amber’s ball cap a gentle tug. “If they put them on the right way, the wind would blow them off.”
“Then I wouldn’t wear a hat at all,” said Amber. “I’d the wind to blow in my hair.”
Presently the little boat slipped behind an island.
Back at the creek, they built a dam of rocks and sand to provide themselves with a small, still pool. In the pool they built islands of other rocks so that they could pretend their floating leaves were boats and that they were sailing from one island to another, always stopping to explore and discuss what their imaginations had conjured up.
Jillian was careful not to disclose too much of what her imagination kept coming up with, because she didn’t think Amber and Chris would understand about a deserted island, a mermaid, and a handsome man—and Mark would understand only too well.
“Could we go on a real boat someday, Mom?”
“We did, hon. Remember, we went on that big ferry last year?”
“Um, yes, but I mean a boat that moves.”
“Amber, that boat did move. It moved us from Tsawwassen to Sidney and back.”
Amber pushed her leaf carefully to the sandy shore of the creek bed and let it come to rest. “I mean like that little boat we just saw. Wouldn’t it be fun to go in one that went real fast and made a noise like it did, slap, slap, slap? And have the wind in our hair?”
“Oh!” Now that she understood, Jillian smiled. Mark, too, smiled in sympathy.
“Sure,” said Jillian. “One of these days we’ll go in a boat that moves like that.”
“Soon?” Amber asked.
“Soon,” she said.
“Maybe even next Sunday?” Amber insisted.
“Sure,” Jillian heard herself add rashly. She didn’t have the faintest idea how she was going to make good her promise, but she would find a way. This time, she told herself, she wouldn’t make Amber wait for the treat the way she had been forced to wait for the picnic. She would rent a boat if necessary.
There was only one problem with that idea. If she did rent one, she wouldn’t have the faintest idea of how to run it.
“I don’t have a boat anymore, Amber,” Mark said, “but I do have an open car you could ride in, and the wind would blow through your hair even better than it did in the Jeep today.”
A picture flashed across his mind of Jillian in his open car with the wind in her hair. As if remembering, too, she reached up and pushed the green scarf higher around the base of her ponytail, her gaze locked with his.
He longed to snatch the scarf off her hair, let it flow free, feel it in his hands, on his face, on his chest, on his...Oh, cripes! He had to control his thoughts. Amber and Chris might be blind to what was happening to him, but Jillian wasn’t. He sensed that she was very much aware, however hard she might try to pretend otherwise. In her gaze he saw a flare of excitement that matched what was surging through him, before she lowered her eyes and hid behind her mascaraed lashes.
“I think I’d really rather go in a boat that bounces, thank you,” Amber said politely.
Jillian sighed so softly that Mark barely heard her, and he reached out to take her hand in his. She refused to look at him again but squeezed his hand in acknowledgment of his offered comfort.
Amber must have heard the sad little sigh, too, because suddenly she hugged her mother around the neck, and Jillian hugged her back tightly.
Chapter Six
LATER, AS A WORN-OUT Amber took a nap on a blanket in the shade, and Chris wandered along the far bank of the creek, picking berries, Jillian sat quietly beside the stream, lifting handful after handful of sand, letting it slowly sift out between her fingers like time slipping away. “What is it?” Mark asked quietly. “Ever since Amber asked to be taken out in a real boat that bounces, you’ve been blue. You shouldn’t be, you know. She’s a smart little kid. She knows she can’t have everything she wants.”
“Yes. But it’s not just the things she wants that I can’t give her, that I haven’t been giving her. There are so many other things she needs.”
Such as a father, she thought.
The matter hadn’t come up until Amber started kindergarten and saw that most kids had fathers, that even if they didn’t always live in the same house as the mothers and children, they were around.
They did things with their kids. And all Amber had was a mom and a grandma.
Oh, she had an aunt and an uncle who lived in Oklahoma, and another uncle who was a long distance trucker, but she was lucky to see them three times a year.
Seeing her respond to Mark really had brought home the fact that single parent families weren’t what nature had intended for children.
Mark slipped his arms around her from behind, and she let her head fall back onto his shoulder for a moment or two, since Chris had gone temporarily out of sight, though they could still see a tall huckleberry bush whipping around as he plundered its bounty.
It felt so good to be held. Mark turned her face to his and brushed his lips lightly over hers, making her heart pound heavily inside her chest. He looked deeply into her eyes, so deeply that she felt a moment’s fear and closed them, as if hiding her soul from him—hiding her building desire. She would have to control it soon, but at the moment she had no strength to lift her head from his shoulder, to move the hand that was stroking her face and neck.
“There are many things I need, too, Jillian,” he said softly. “And first among them is you.”
Her eyes popped open. He didn’t hesitate when there was something he wanted, did he? Even when there were two kids either of whom could pop up at any second.
“Mark. This isn’t a good time—”
“Is there ever going to be a good time, Jillian?” His gaze was so intense that she couldn’t look away, and she didn’t have an answer for him.
She could only say helplessly, quietly, “Don’t. Please don’t. Chris—”
“Chris is quite happily attacking that huckleberry bush on the other side of the creek. He isn’t even in sight. And Amber is sound asleep. Besides, I only want to hold you and talk to you. Jillian, we have to make some kind of plans.”
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