He was silent as she stroked the muscles of his back. So silent that, after a moment, she said, “Is everything okay?”
Of course everything wasn’t okay. Four years he’d been working on his own. Four years he’d felt as though something inside him had died. And now, he left her alone for a few weeks, and this was what he came back to?
“I’m just surprised,” he said. “That you’re writing again. After all this time.”
“It just bubbled up out of me,” she said. “You do realize the song was about me? About us?”
“Was it?”
“I don’t think I realized it was, at the time I wrote it. Not consciously. But my subconscious knew where it was taking me, even if I didn’t.”
She didn’t have a clue. And what would be the point of enlightening her? She was almost giddy with what she’d regained. It wouldn’t do any good to point out to her that he felt like something she’d just flushed down the toilet. Besides, in the end, he would cave. He always caved. She won every argument. Not because she was always right, but because he loved her too much to not let her win.
And the thought of losing her, ever, turned his insides into a tangled, bloody mess.
So he would set his feelings aside and focus instead on Paige’s accomplishments. That was easier. Less likely to lead to an atomic explosion and the start of World War III.
He adjusted position, lay his head against her breast, and she tangled her fingers in his hair. “I swear to God,” he said softly, “I got goose bumps the minute she opened her mouth. All I could think about was what we could do with her. How we could guide her and shape her. Help her build a career. With a voice like that, and the two of us behind her, she could be huge.” He rubbed his thumb against her bare hip. “Then I came crashing back to earth and remembered that she might sing like she’s been rode hard and put away wet, but she’s just fifteen, and she’s my little girl, and it’s way too early to even think about a career. I would never subject a kid her age to that kind of life. It would eat her alive.”
“Some parents do.”
“Not this parent.”
“I’m glad you feel that way. She acts so tough on the outside, but inside, she’s just a scared kid who doesn’t know which way is up.”
“Why’d you end up picking a family gathering for her coming-out party?”
“It was her idea. She was too scared to sing for you alone. It was easier in a crowd. You do realize she did this for you? That was the motivation behind it. We worked on it for weeks. She may pretend she doesn’t care, but I’ve gotten to know her pretty well, and I believe she desperately wants your approval.”
“Well, she’s got it.”
“You need to reinforce that, every chance you get. While you were away, I got to see a few cracks in that hard shell of hers.”
“I’ll work on it.”
They lay, limp and drowsy, her fingertips tracing formless patterns on his skin. “I love it when you do that,” he said.
“This?”
“Mmn.”
“And this?”
“That, too,” he said. “You tired?”
“A little. You?”
“A little. You feel good in your birthday suit, Mrs. MacKenzie.”
“Mmn. You, too.”
“You want to, um…?”
“Can I take a rain check? Tomorrow? I’m more tired than I thought.”
“Yeah, of course.” He kissed her hip, pressed his cheek against her warm flesh. “Tomorrow’s fine.”
“Love you.”
“I love you, too.”
He realized, after another minute, that she’d fallen asleep. With no other options, he tucked away the hurt and the resentment, wrapped himself around her, and matched his breathing to hers.
Casey
She was vacuuming the living room when she found the cufflink.
On her knees, with the vacuum hose shoved deep under the couch to capture all the dust bunnies, she heard the metallic clink as the machine sucked up something hard, then the high-pitched whine that told her whatever it was had stalled in its journey.
Casey toed the off switch, waited for the machine to power down, then disconnected the hose to see what was clogging her vacuum. In the midst of a tangle of dog hair, dust, and a single Froot Loop, she found the cufflink. The square black onyx stone was embedded with a solid-gold, diamond-studded “F” fashioned in fancy script. She took it in her hand, staring at it with incomprehension, absolutely certain that she’d burned it, along with its mate and all Danny’s other possessions, when she’d finally decided to exorcise him from her life.
Shaken, she closed her fist over the cufflink even as she closed her eyes against the rush of memory that assaulted her without warning.
She’d bought them for him as a tenth-anniversary gift. Ten years prior, in a city hall in a small town in Maryland, at rush hour on a weekday afternoon, they’d held hands and vowed to cherish each other until death. On this landmark tenth anniversary, they were in London, where Danny was doing a series of shows, and as usual, he’d been stuck in rehearsal for most of the day. Katie’d had the sniffles, so she had left their daughter with a hotel babysitter and, umbrella in hand, had ventured out, following vague directions from the concierge, to find an anniversary gift suitable for a man who had everything.
Ten years. A milestone. One she’d doubted, a time or two, that they would ever see. But after years of struggling, they’d achieved a hard-won success, and their life, and their marriage, had settled into an odd kind of normalcy. Danny’s career had soared to heights they’d never imagined. Her career as a songwriter had brought her a great deal of money and, more importantly, the recognition of her peers. Then there was Katie, her precious Katydid, a gift from God, the angel at the top of her metaphorical Christmas tree. Life was good. Not perfect; Danny was spending far too much time away from home, but that was a trade-off. There were always trade-offs.
Tonight, for instance, they’d be celebrating their anniversary in the privacy of their hotel room before the show, because it was so difficult for Danny to go out in public without being mobbed. But those were minor annoyances. Overall, these were the best years of their marriage.
She spent hours that afternoon wandering the streets, from gift shop to department store, searching but finding nothing suitable to commemorate the landmark occasion. She’d just about given up when she saw the antiques shop and decided to go inside. Not to find something for Danny—for what on earth would she find for Danny in an antiques shop?—but to satisfy her own desire to poke around all those wonderful, dusty antiques.
She spent a good half-hour just wandering, undisturbed, amid trash and treasure, before approaching the glass case that held antique and estate jewelry. She leaned over the case, examining hat pins and gaudy brooches. Behind the case, the proprietor, short and middle-aged and ruddy of face, gave her a wide smile and said in a lilting Irish brogue, “Might there be anything special ye’d be looking for, Miss?”
That was when she spied the cufflinks, lying on a white satin cloth inside the case. Elegant, unique, and monogrammed with an “F” for Fiore. A bit pretentious, but she knew instantly that Danny would love them. Somehow, he’d come to the conclusion that his self-worth could be measured by money and possessions, and she’d never had the heart to tell him he was wrong. “Those,” she said, pointing. “The cufflinks. May I look at them?”
“Aye,” he said. “An American.” He slid open the case and took out the cufflinks. “These came from an estate sale in Yorkshire. They’re very old. Would ye be buying them for yerself?”
She picked one up, felt its coolness, its heft. “For my husband. It’s our tenth anniversary.”
“Ah! Yer husband obviously likes pretty things. A man after me own heart. After all, look at the pretty girl he married. Will ye be buying them, then? Shall I wrap ‘em for ye?”
“Yes. Please.”
She left the shop feeling a sense of satisfaction. Danny was so hard
to shop for. His tastes were very specific, and he didn’t lack for anything. He made a lot of money, and he liked to spend it. As a result, it had grown increasingly difficult to find a meaningful gift that he either didn’t already have or couldn’t just buy for himself. But she felt confident that she’d found the one item in the entire city of London that was perfect for him.
Casey returned to the hotel, feeling almost giddy. Katie was napping in her room, attended by the babysitter who was watching daytime television with the volume turned low. Danny was still at rehearsal, so she called room service to order their dinner, then took a shower and changed into the dress she’d bought for the occasion. The Cheongsam style dress, with its keyhole neckline, was fashioned of a jade-green silk Asian print almost precisely the color of her eyes. It hugged her body, accentuating her curves, its split skirt highlighting her legs. Checking herself in the mirror, she decided she looked damn good for a woman who’d graduated from high school a decade earlier. She’d done a lot of living in those ten years, but none of it showed on the outside. The scars were all on the inside.
She checked the clock. Danny was running late. What else was new? He finally came in, gave her a quick kiss, and headed for the shower. “I’m sorry I’m late,” he said. “The sound check took forever. The acoustics in that place are a nightmare.”
“I ordered dinner. It should be here any minute.”
“Oh, Christ.” He paused, and she saw regret in those blue eyes. “I hate to do this to you, carissima, but I don’t think I dare to eat anything before the show. Maybe later?”
And he disappeared into the bathroom.
While he was in there, room service arrived. The waiter wheeled in the cart, and she signed for the meal, giving him a generous tip. Then she went into Katie’s room and dismissed the babysitter. If they weren’t having the candlelight dinner she’d planned, it was pointless to pay somebody to watch over their daughter.
When Danny came back, dressed for the concert, they exchanged gifts. He loved the cufflinks, just as she’d known he would. After admiring them, he kissed her and asked, “Where did you find these?”
“In a little antiques shop here in London. I saw them and knew they’d just been sitting there, waiting for me to discover them. Waiting for you.”
His gift to her was an exquisite, five-carat, princess-cut diamond necklace. She stood before the mirror, staring at her reflection, while behind her, his warm fingers fumbled with the clasp. The single stone fell, cold and hard, into the hollow between her breasts. She caught it in her hand, adjusted it until it faced frontward. “There,” he said, his breath warm on her bare shoulder. “It looks beautiful on you.”
She studied her mirror image with a critical eye. The necklace was all wrong for her. The stone was too big, too flashy. After ten years, he still didn’t understand that big and flashy were words that didn’t belong in the same sentence with the name Casey Bradley Fiore. But she would wear it, would cherish it, because she loved him and he’d given it to her.
After all those years, the couple reflected in the mirror still looked good together. A slender, petite, pretty—some would say beautiful—dark-haired woman. An achingly handsome blue-eyed man whose tawny hair fell in a neat line past his collar to his shoulders. He took her breath away. He had since the first moment she lay eyes on him, ten years earlier, standing in the kitchen of the house she’d grown up in, this handsome stranger, this unknown singer from Boston who had huge ambitions and was determined that she would write for him. She’d walked away from her life, her fiancé, her family, to be with him. It hadn’t been all sunshine and roses. Rivers of darkness ran through her marriage. But she loved him, and she’d stood by him through it all. They had a beautiful daughter, successful careers, more money than they would ever know what to do with. A charmed life. And she had no regrets. She kept reminding herself that she had no regrets.
They each drank a single flute of champagne before Rob knocked on the door to tell Danny that the limo had arrived to take them to the venue. They’d certainly come a long way from the creaky old converted buses they’d started touring in. Immediately distracted, already someplace she couldn’t follow him, Danny left her standing there with Rob and went into the bedroom to say goodnight to his daughter.
In the foyer of the hotel suite, Rob stood awkwardly, hands in his pockets, jingling loose change. He finally said, “If I may be so bold as to say so, Fiore, you are one hot ticket in that dress.”
Danny hadn’t said a word about the dress. She wasn’t sure he’d even noticed it. Tears scalded her eyelids. She blinked them back. “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you for noticing.”
He studied her from beneath lowered eyelids. “Are you okay?”
“Of course I’m okay. It’s my anniversary. Ten years. A milestone. You have to be okay on your anniversary. It’s a law of the universe. I’m sure it must be written down somewhere.”
Before he could respond, Danny blew back through, pausing to give her a quick, husbandly peck on the cheek. “Later,” he said. “I promise I’ll make it up to you later.”
She knew he would make the effort. Danny might not always get it right, but he did try. She straightened his collar. “I know you will, darling.”
And he was gone, sprinting down the corridor toward the elevator. For a long moment, she and Rob studied each other. He opened his mouth to speak.
“Don’t say it,” she warned him.
He clamped his mouth shut. Took a step closer, brushed a tear from her cheek. And whispered in her ear, “Smoking hot. Happy anniversary, kiddo.”
Seven years later and a lifetime away from that London hotel room, kneeling on her living room floor beside her vacuum cleaner, Casey frowned at the cufflink in her hand. Why was it he could still get to her? Even now, with the way she felt about Rob, Danny could still get to her. Would it be this way for the rest of her life? He’d left her with so many scars, scars that were still raw, buried deep inside her. And certain memories could still rip her heart from her chest.
Trying to stem the flow of tears, she glanced around the room. “Are you here somewhere?” she demanded. “Did you do this deliberately, to stir things up?” She brushed furiously at a tear, shoved the cufflink into her pocket. “When are you ever going to let go of me, Danny?” Picking up the vacuum cleaner hose, she struggled for a moment to reattach it. Then she stood and took a hard breath. “For God’s sake,” she whispered, “leave me alone.”
And she turned the vacuum back on.
Rob
“What’s this?” he said.
Half-buried in the freezer in search of something to make for lunch, Casey paused, leaned back and turned to see the object he held in his hand. “It’s a cufflink.”
He raised an eyebrow, turned the object on its side. “I can see that. But whose?”
“It was Danny’s.” She snatched it away from him and pocketed it before he could get a better look.
He squared his jaw. “I thought you got rid of all Danny’s stuff.”
She returned to searching the freezer. From behind the door, she said, “I did.”
“Then where’d it come from?”
She slowly emerged from behind the freezer door and gazed at him impassively. “I don’t have a clue. I found it this morning when I was vacuuming. Why are you giving me the third degree?”
“I’m not. I’m just asking.”
“Well, I don’t have a crystal ball. Maybe Leroy fished it out from under the refrigerator. Are you planning to make a federal case out of it?”
A smart man knew when to shut up. He wasn’t sure he qualified for that designation, but he clamped his mouth shut anyway. “No, ma’am,” he said.
She gave him the Death Glare. Slowly closed the freezer door. And said, “I’m not feeling well. I think I’ll go upstairs and lie down. I trust that the two of you can manage lunch on your own.” And she left him standing there in the kitchen with his mouth hanging open.
Across the room, his
daughter said, “Feisty one, isn’t she?”
“Wipe that smirk off your face or I’ll make you cook.”
Paige arranged her face into a somber mask, but the amusement was still there in her eyes. “I thought you liked my cooking.”
“Did I miss something crucial? Because I don’t know who that woman is. Was there some memo I was supposed to get? Did the rules of the game change while I was away, only nobody bothered to tell me?”
“Maybe we should just…you know.” At his probing look, she shrugged. “Get lunch?”
“Hold that thought. I’ll be back.”
He found his wife upstairs, flat on the bed, fists clenched tightly and a damp washcloth draped across her eyes. He sat gingerly on the edge of the mattress and said softly, “Headache?”
“I’m fine.”
“You don’t look fine.” What she looked was pale. Ashen. Concerned, he brushed his knuckles across her cheek. “You look like crap.”
“Thank you, Doctor MacKenzie, for that ego-boosting analysis.”
“You know what I meant. Maybe you’re coming down with something.”
“I’m tired!” she snapped. “Am I not allowed to be tired?” A tear trickled from beneath the washcloth.
What the hell was going on here? Where was his sweet and stoic wife, and who was this weeping and witchy woman? “You’re always tired lately,” he said. “I’m worried about you. Maybe you should see your doctor. There could be something wrong with—”
“For the love of God, MacKenzie—” She tore the washcloth from her face to glower at him, and something she’d been clutching in her fist dropped to the mattress. “Will you stop hovering over me and just leave me the hell alone?”
He stared in bewilderment at the cufflink she’d just dropped. Danny’s cufflink. The one she’d been clutching so tightly while she lay crying on the bed. Their bed. His and hers. The one place in this house where Daniel No-Middle-Name Fiore had no business showing his pretty-boy face.
He squared his jaw. “Fine,” he said.
Days Like This Page 26