by Tami Hoag
Jace banded one arm around her shoulders and pulled her closer, until she was half-lying across his lap. Her swelling breasts nestled into the hardness of his chest, her hip pressed against the hardness of his manhood. Their bodies greeted each other as if the time apart had bred nothing but hunger inside them. Rebecca suddenly felt as if her body were nothing more than a shell built to encompass the sharp ache of need, a need only Jace could satisfy.
Tears flooded her eyes as despair washed away all other emotion. How could she still want him? After the way he’d hurt her, after the way he’d simply left, how could she feel this kind of need? After all the nights she’d cried herself to sleep, how could her heart betray her so?
In one fluid movement, Rebecca broke the kiss, stood up, and started for the door.
Jace’s heart was pounding. Desire throbbed through his whole body. Desire and surprise. The intensity of the kiss, of the need it had triggered, had knocked him for a loop. True, he had wanted to kiss Rebecca practically from the moment he’d seen her earlier in the day. He had actually fantasized about kissing her when he’d been lying in a hospital bed in Chicago. Renewing a relationship with her had seemed important, but he hadn’t realized until now just how important.
He was in love with her.
The idea that she was leaving when he’d just made this monumental discovery didn’t appeal to him in the least. He wanted to get up and go after her, but the pain in his knee prevented him.
“Becca?” he called, feeling helpless at the knowledge that she wouldn’t come back this time.
He couldn’t stop her, and a part of him couldn’t blame her. He’d hurt her before, and she probably figured the odds were even he’d do it again.
The kiss had probably been a mistake, but he couldn’t regret it. It had shaken them both right down to their socks. It had brought to light the fact that what had been between them before hadn’t died. Sooner or later Rebecca was going to have to accept that.
The sooner the better, he thought as his body geared down from desire to aching frustration.
“I have to go,” she whispered, not trusting her voice, not trusting herself to turn and face him.
Mrs. Marquardt passed her in the doorway. “Bye-bye, Rebecca. Say hello to your father for me.” Brandishing a huge red plaid ice bag, she bustled toward Jace. “Just what the doctor ordered, Mr. Cooper.”
She’d never failed a test in her life.
“You got a big, flaming F on this one, Rebecca,” she muttered under her breath as she shooed an orange tabby away from her car door.
Her hands were shaking when she went to start the car. To steady herself, she sat back and took a slow, deep breath. Her head was filled with the subtle scent of Jace Cooper—warm, masculine. His taste lingered on her lips—warm, masculine—not unwanted, as her body had so rudely informed her, but unwelcome.
Swearing, she gunned the car’s engine. Cats flew out from under the Honda and bounded for Muriel’s sagging porch.
Dammit, she didn’t want Jace Cooper back. Maybe her hormones had gone into rebellion for a wild moment or two, but she damn well did not want Jace Cooper back. She had the kind of quiet, orderly life every normal person wanted; she didn’t need a human tornado like Jace to roar through and wreak havoc. She knew from experience the kind of destruction he left behind when he sailed out of town.
And he would sail out of town. He’d as much as told her he was just biding his time, waiting for the Kings to figure out they couldn’t get along without him. He would leave, just as he had before. Only this time he wouldn’t be dragging her heart along with him when he went. She would make certain of that.
As she turned the corner, Rebecca couldn’t quite shake the mental image of the sincerity in Jace’s eyes when he’d told her he had changed, that he wasn’t the same man who’d broken her heart seven years before. She couldn’t shake the image, but she couldn’t make herself believe in it either.
Jace had been in a bad accident, and it had scared him. It was natural for people to come away from an experience like that with promises to change the way they lived their lives. That didn’t mean he would keep the promise. She was certain he wouldn’t.
In a way she had envied him. Jace had been brash and reckless, with little regard for the rules of polite society. He had been above the rules. A wealth of talent had made him exempt, while it had made her a prisoner of sorts.
She had always been the one to toe the line, the “good” Bradshaw girl. The pressure to accept responsibility, to live up to other people’s expectations, had been with Rebecca as long as she could remember. And she had always conformed. Jace Cooper hadn’t known the meaning of the word.
He hadn’t changed, Rebecca thought, shaking her head.
Same old Jace.
But Rebecca knew the real danger wasn’t the bad points of the old Jace. There wouldn’t have been anything difficult in loathing a man who partied too hard, gambled too much, and used his friends. The real danger was her memories of the qualities that had made her fall in love with him.
Jace could be sweet and genuinely caring when it suited him. He could be a compassionate confidant. He could be insightful. He could be tender. He had understood her as no one else ever had.
Rebecca groaned as she parked the car in her garage and killed the engine. She didn’t have an ounce of energy left. The only thing that had kept her going for the last few minutes had been tension, and it seeped out of her now. Her shoulders sagged. She gave in to the urge to rest her head on the steering wheel.
How was she going to be able to face Jace in the therapy room first thing in the morning? Like a predator scenting weakness in its victim, he would move in for the kill after that fiasco in his room.
She was going to have to lay down the law right away. Jace would find out in short order that she was the boss—of her therapy department and of her heart. She didn’t take guff and she didn’t date patients, and that was that. Rules were rules.
As if rules had ever stopped Jace Cooper.
Muttering, Rebecca scooped up her coat and purse and trudged to the back door. When she tried the knob, it was locked. A yellow light blinked at her from the control panel beside the door. The voice that spoke from the box was her own.
“I’m sorry. You can’t go in. This door is security checked. At the tone you will have sixty seconds to use your house key before the alarm sounds.”
As the tone sounded, she dropped her keys and then spilled the contents of her purse onto the step when she bent to retrieve them. Change scattered. Lipsticks and tampons rolled off in every direction.
“Fifty seconds,” the box said in a pleasant tone.
Rebecca dropped to her knees, digging through the rubble for the house key. She pulled it up and jammed it into the lock, but still the knob wouldn’t turn.
“Forty seconds.”
“Oh, shut up.” She rattled the knob and hit the key with the heel of her hand, all to no avail.
“Thirty seconds.”
Reflecting on the lesser points of living with a retired computer science professor turned-inventor, she quickly picked up her things and walked around the side of the house to the dining room window. The table was set, ready and waiting for dinner to begin. Hugh Bradshaw occupied his usual chair. Rebecca scowled at the headline of the sports section he was reading. SUPER COOPER SENT DOWN TO MAVERICKS.
“Dad!” she yelled.
Hugh glanced up and looked around. “Daughter, what are you doing out there?”
“The door won’t let me in. It’s that crazy alarm system.”
He shook his head. “Don’t go blaming my alarm system just because you’re not mechanical.”
“I shouldn’t have to be mechanical to get into my own house,” she pointed out irritably. “Will you let me in before that thing summons the Marines or whatever it does at the end of sixty seconds?”
“The alarm was disconnected,” Hugh said, swinging the back door open moments later. “I was just te
sting the timing mechanism.” He pulled her key out of the lock and held it up. “Why didn’t you use this?”
“Because it wouldn’t work.” She gritted her teeth at the shake of his head. His expression clearly bemoaned her lack of mechanical ability.
Rebecca strode past him and dumped the armload of stuff that had fallen out of her purse onto the kitchen table.
“I hear Jace Cooper is back in town,” Hugh said in his quiet, matter-of-fact voice.
“Yes. Do we have any mega-strength aspirin?”
Her father scratched the back of his head with one hand and propped the other at the waistband of his jeans as he watched her hunt through the cupboard. He was a trim, wiry man, two inches shorter than his eldest daughter. Age hadn’t lessened his ability to read her every mood. “I take it you’re not pleased.”
“An understatement, to say the very least. I’m not pleased to have him in Mishawaka. I’m not pleased to have him as a patient in my PT department. And I’m extremely displeased to have him living across the alley from me.” She washed the aspirin down with a gulp of tap water. Her thick black brows drew together in confusion. “Don’t you think it’s odd Muriel rented a room to him? She never mentioned wanting to do that.”
Hugh mumbled something unintelligible as he bent to pull a casserole out of the oven. His thin cheeks were rosy with heat when he stood up, and his blue eyes were glued to the steam rising from the Stroganoff.
He pulled a long-handled spoon out of a crock on the counter and sank it into the fragrant mass of noodles and beef. “Who knows what Muriel thinks anymore, locked up in that mausoleum with all those cats. She needs something to get her blood going. Maybe Jace will be good for her.”
“I guess it would be nice if he were good for somebody,” Rebecca remarked dryly.
“But not you?”
She shook her head. “Not anymore, Dad. Not again. He wasn’t any good for me before.”
“That’s not quite how I remember it. As I recall, you were in love with him.”
“Was—past tense. I learned my lesson.”
“Maybe too well,” he muttered, his mustache drooping as he carried their dinner out to the table.
Rebecca stared at the back of his white head as he walked away from her. Just what had he meant by that? Somehow she didn’t think she wanted to know, not at the moment at least. All she wanted was supper, a hot bath, and to get to bed early.
The image of herself and Jace sprawled on the mattress of that mahogany monster of a bed burned through her mind. Her soft mouth turned down in disapproval as she took her place at the dinner table.
Justin said grace, throwing in his request for a dog at the end. Rebecca gave him a look of reproach as she dished up his plate.
It wasn’t difficult for her to steer the conversation away from Jace during dinner. Gregarious and outgoing, Justin always had a wealth of stories to relate at the end of the day.
Her father was less cooperative, but he let the subject die when she asked him about his latest project. Since he’d retired from teaching, he had spent much of his time in the basement working on computer-controlled security systems and household gadgets.
His interest in inventing had surfaced years ago, Rebecca remembered, when ALS had been steadily eroding her mother’s physical abilities. He had come up with little mechanical wizards to make Gabrielle’s life easier or simply to bring a smile to her lovely face. Now he worked on his inventions for enjoyment and to keep his tack-sharp mind active.
His newest project was a robot. The programming was going well, he informed her, but there were mechanical bugs to be worked out yet.
“Jace was always good with his hands,” Hugh reflected. “Mechanically speaking, that is. Maybe I’ll give him a call since he’s going to have some free time.”
Rebecca shot him a look that clearly branded him a traitor.
“You’re too hard on the boy.”
“The operative word there being ‘boy,’ as in ‘has yet to grow up,’” she said.
Her father leaned his elbows on the table and pinned her with the stern gaze that had made more than one Notre Dame student squirm in his seat over the years. “You’re too hard on people in general, daughter, yourself included. What happened with you and Jace happened long ago. You were both little more than kids. Don’t you think it’s time to forgive and forget?”
She had worked hard to forget. Until today she would have said she had forgotten. But it seemed she hadn’t let go of the memory, she had simply buried it.
As for forgiveness, that was something that had never come easily to her. Life had rules. People were supposed to follow them. It had always seemed simple to her. Jace had broken the rules. She had loved him with all her young girl’s heart. He had taken her heart and broken it. How could she forgive him? Why should she?
These questions haunted her all evening, through Justin’s bath and bedtime right up to her own. The questions turned over and around in her brain until she became impatient with the whole process.
Dressed in her prim cotton nightgown and her reading glasses, she grabbed a pad of paper and a pen off her writing desk and settled herself in bed. With bold strokes of the pen, she made a list of the things that were bothering her, which eventually boiled down to two words: Jace Cooper. Next she made a list of her options in dealing with the problem, then eliminated the ones that didn’t appeal to her.
The idea that was left on the page was the one that made the most sense: Put the past behind you and treat Jace Cooper as you would treat any other patient or acquaintance. You don’t want to get involved, so don’t get involved.
She congratulated herself. This was simple, this was logical, this was the intelligent way to deal with the situation. Setting her glasses and the tablet on the night table, she turned out the light and pulled the covers up around her.
Through her lace-framed window she could see across the alley to the back side of Muriel Marquardt’s house. A single light burned in the window of one downstairs room near the back porch.
In the dark, with her logical pad and pen out of sight, Rebecca couldn’t stop herself from wondering what Jace was still doing up. Was he in pain? Was he lonely? Was he thinking about her?
She pulled the covers up tighter around her chin, shook her head, and thought of Yogi Berra, who once had said, in a moment of profound wisdom, “It ain’t over till it’s over.”
4
Dawn came on the heels of a long, sleepless night. Rebecca dragged herself out of bed and went through her morning routine. It soon became obvious that it was going to be one of those days when none of her clothes fit right or combined to make an outfit and her hair defied styling. She finally gave up, put on a simple black dress, and slicked her hair back into a ponytail.
She grimaced at her reflection in the mirror above her dresser. Her skin was pale, and dark shadows lay under her green eyes. Lipstick only emphasized the drooping corners of her mouth. She felt as blue as the walls reflected in the mirror.
“You look as if you’re going to a funeral,” she said, “as the guest of honor.”
She shrugged, then turned and left the room. The look was appropriate to her mood; why change it?
“Who died?” Hugh asked calmly as Rebecca stepped into the kitchen, made a beeline for the coffee maker, and poured herself a cup.
She shot her father a dangerous look.
“Eggs?” he asked innocently, pointing his spatula at the frying pan on the stove in front of him.
“No, thank you. I’ll just have coffee this morning.”
Justin stomped into the room with an ominous scowl on his usually cheerful face. He stopped in front of Rebecca, planted his hands at the waistband of his jeans, and tapped his sneaker impatiently against the linoleum. “How come I have to eat eggs and you don’t?”
“Because I’m bigger than you are,” Rebecca said.
The three of them sat down at the kitchen table to begin what promised to be an unpleasant meal. Just
in promptly spilled a glass of milk all over himself and the floor.
“Oh, Justin!” Rebecca wailed, leaping up from her chair to grab a towel. “Now you’re going to have to change clothes. You’re going to be late for school, I’m going to be late for work.”
He looked down at her as she sopped milk up off the floor. Sullenly he muttered, “If we had a dog, it could lick it up.”
Rebecca shook a finger at him. “Don’t start with that dog business, Justin. I’m in no mood.”
“Yes, you are,” he grumbled, tearing his toast into ragged pieces. “You’re in a bad mood.”
“Go change.” She enunciated each word carefully.
He slid down off his chair in slow motion, tempting fate as only a small boy can. “Mom, can I go see Mr. Cooper after school?”
Rebecca’s heart thudded into her breastbone. She wanted Justin and Jace together about as much as she wanted to contract malaria. Without looking up she gave her answer in a tone of voice that did not invite debate. “No.”
Justin’s expression clearly branded her as the most unfair mother on the face of the earth, possibly in the universe. “But Grandpa told me he’s a big baseball star, and he’s famous and everything!”
She rose and turned away, tossing the wet towel into the sink. “That doesn’t give you the right to bother him.”
“I promise I won’t bother him.”
“No.”
“But, Mom—”
“Justin,” Rebecca said sharply, wheeling to glare at him with her most dire look, “go change your clothes. I don’t want to hear another word about Jace Cooper.”
“Hmmm….” Hugh sighed, rattling his newspaper. His mustache drooped around his mouth as he watched his grandson stomp out of the room.
“Don’t start, Dad. Don’t start with me,” Rebecca said.