by Laurel Greer
One of Sam’s? Couldn’t be. Her sister hadn’t brought more than a box of her late husband’s belongings when she’d moved home from Colorado. She swam in the garment, still way too thin even a year and a bit after being widowed. Jeez, on the summit of the mountain, where the ceremony was to take place, she’d blow over if a gust hit her.
“Sexy shirt,” Lauren teased.
Cadie glanced down at her front, then back up at Lauren. Her lips pressed into a line and indecision flashed across her face before she cleared her throat. “Perfect for the ceremony, right? I know the light blue isn’t quite the same as the turquoise, but it’s close enough. I found it in Gwen’s guest closet.”
“It’ll work awesome for pictures.” She drummed her fingers against the table. “Can we talk, Cades?”
Her sister’s smile stretched her skin across her jaw, cast hollows in her cheeks. “You didn’t need me—didn’t want to—and that hurts. But we shouldn’t think about it today.”
Lauren drew back. “But I do need your help.”
“Don’t force the issue just to make up.”
“I’m not.” It wasn’t about finding something random to confess in order to make up with her sister. She needed Cadie as a confidante, damn it. There was no one else to talk to about Tavish.
“Yeah?” Cadie spooned another tiny heap of applesauce into Ben’s surprisingly clean mouth, sounding cautiously hopeful. “Ready to stop treating me like I’m going to fall apart?”
“Yeah. I just didn’t think you needed to worry about me. Didn’t want to be your tipping point.”
“Ah.” Cadie switched containers and scooped yogurt onto the spoon. She let out a frustrated breath. “I’m not helpless, Lauren. And I don’t get why you became the mama bear.”
“Someone needed to be.”
Her sister studied the floor. “You’re not Mom, Lauren.”
“I know that.”
“Do you?” Cadie looked up, stared straight into all of Lauren’s dark, ugly corners.
“Uh-huh.” She couldn’t get the sound out with the convincingness she wanted. “No one could be like Mom.”
“No one needs to be like Mom.”
Her chest tightened. She couldn’t quite bring herself to agree.
Letting out a long breath, Cadie fed Ben the last scrapings from the bowl of applesauce. “It’s too much effort to stay mad at family. I’ll probably be hurt for a while, but it’s impossible not to forgive you, Laur. But tell me something. When did you start sleeping with Tavish again?”
Lauren’s jaw hit her lap. She reflexively touched her stomach—obviously still flat, so Cadie hadn’t figured out about her failed attempt at closure that way. “I—What do you mean?”
“Come on,” her sister scoffed. “The way he was looking at you last night? The way you were looking at him? No way has it been a year since you’ve done the dirty deed.”
“Uh...” She wasn’t going to lie to her sister again, but she couldn’t make her voice work to admit the truth.
Cadie wiped Ben’s face with a wet cloth and took her babbling son out of the old high chair Gwen had unearthed from the attic. Bouncing Ben on her lap, she pierced Lauren with a saberlike gaze. “You’re not the only person who’s worried about her sister. It’s not exactly easy to mend a broken heart.”
“My heart’s already broken, Cadie. It can’t get worse.”
Cadie’s look of disbelief was clear, and echoed the warnings in Lauren’s gut. “Falling in love with someone twice isn’t worse than doing it once?”
Not when you’d never stopped loving the person. But loving Tavish wasn’t enough. Hadn’t been then, wouldn’t be now. The day of her grandparents’ funeral, he’d sat in his thinking place, a pleading look stretching his handsome face. I can’t take pictures of Montana forever. And then the clincher: Please. Love me enough to come with me.
She’d said no.
And now her pregnancy made following him doubly impossible.
But living with the look of devastation she’d put on his face was no easier a year after the fact. Words tumbled out before she could stop it. “Memorial Day weekend. When he was home, we...”
“Made love—”
“Had sex.”
“Semantics.” Cadie waved a hand. “I think you love him, so it’s making love.”
It so had been. “I’m not going to disagree.”
Ben tugged at one of Cadie’s loose curls. Cadie untangled his fingers from her hair and kissed his fingertips. And Lauren flashed forward a year or two, to having her own baby. Alone, like her sister.
Her stomach rolled and she wrapped her arms around her midsection. “You want me to confide in you? Here goes—I’m pregnant.”
Cadie froze, the only movement in her body the long, slow blink of her eyelids. Even Ben’s tiny palm smacking her on the nose didn’t get her moving.
“It’s not that big a deal,” Lauren joked, though the poor attempt at humor came out way too wobbly to be worthy of a laugh.
“You’re pregnant.”
“Yeah. I have a bone to pick with a certain prophylactic company.”
Cadie shook her head. “Does he know?”
“Yeah.”
“What are you going to do?”
“We haven’t gotten that far.” Lauren’s heart clamored, made her want to rip the traitorous thing right out of her chest. Beyond its physiological necessity, the organ had been way too much trouble as of late. “He says he wants to be involved. But he also insists he can’t settle in town.” She scrubbed her fingers over her mouth, then stopped. Stupid nervous reaction, making her smear her lip gloss.
“That’s a bit contradictory,” Cadie said carefully, plunking Ben’s diaper-cushioned bottom on the table in front of her.
“Just a little.” Lauren fisted an abandoned paper napkin and began to worry the edges. “Get this—he says he loves me.”
“He probably does,” Cadie ventured. “But the way he loves and the way you need to be loved don’t line up.”
A wave of anxiety knocked Lauren off kilter. Were they too misaligned to even function as parents? “So what do I do?”
“It’s not about what you do, Laur. It’s about what he does. If he’s going to say he loves you and wants to be involved, then he needs to prove that to you.”
And that would be great and all, provided he was able to prove himself. But if he tried and failed, she didn’t know if she could put herself back together again. Or if she talked to him about it and he refused to even try—for her, or their child—what would she do then?
Before Lauren could reply, Mackenzie entered the kitchen wearing a thin, knee-length bathrobe tied over her bump. “This looks like way too serious a conversation for my wedding morning.” She grinned and placed her hands on the sides of her stomach. “You both look great. And I’m about to, as soon as I feed the poppy seed.”
Cadie looked at Mackenzie’s stomach and then pointedly at Lauren, but didn’t say anything to break her confidence. “Kenz, don’t get me wrong. You’re stunning and gorgeous and every synonym for beautiful in the entire world. But that baby you’re carrying is way too big to be referred to as a poppy seed anymore.”
For the rest of the morning they fought with Mackenzie and Cadie’s curls, got their fingers stuck together with false eyelash glue and interspersed the curses that followed with a whole lot of laughs. Plenty to occupy Lauren’s attention. But keeping her mind on wedding prep involved more effort than she was capable of. The possibility of Tavish proving he loved her and wanting to be involved in raising their baby consumed her, refused to go away.
* * *
A wildflower carpet ringed the grassy area where, framed by summer-bare peaks, Drew and Mackenzie kissed at the end of their wedding ceremony. Tavish watched with stinging eyes, but hadn’t heard a word. The script from his own
vows, long since memorized, played on a loop in his head.
Love. Honor. Cherish.
Funny how fulfilling those vows had meant breaking off his marriage.
But the baby meant reconnecting in some way. It wasn’t going to be as lovers or partners in the true sense of the word—nothing like having your I love you replied to with We’re crazy—but there was still an intimacy involved in being parents.
The recessional music started and he pressed pause on the mental tape before it drove him totally insane. Making eye contact with his ex-wife, he met her in the center of the altar and took her hand in the crook of his arm. They followed the bride and groom down the aisle.
It was utterly impossible to retreat from an altar with Lauren without envisioning her face when the organist at the little chapel on the Strip had struck up the beginning notes of “Can’t Help Falling in Love with You.” Lauren’s hair still smelled sultry, tropical, like swimming under a Hawaiian waterfall. The scent wafted at him on the mountain breeze. Then, he’d wrecked her fussy up-do not five minutes after they’d left the chapel. That limousine ride...
He interrupted his memories with a string of silent swearing. Nine hours to go. Sure, they’d be working together for the next couple of weeks, but at least they wouldn’t be thinking about weddings the whole time.
No, we’ll be thinking about babies.
An incongruent blend of excitement and terror climbed into his throat as they approached the end of the aisle.
“Everyone’s looking at us,” Lauren whispered.
He slowed his pace to accommodate her. Her stupidly impractical—but atrociously sexy—shoes looked to be getting stuck in the ground.
“Well, you’re starting to get that rosy pregnant glow,” he replied, voice just as quiet as hers.
She flushed, hissed out a shush.
He cleared his throat, which had clogged as soon as he’d connected Lauren and pregnant and glow. “You’re too easy to tease, sweetheart.”
“I’m not in the mood.” She dug her fingers into his arm. “I’m already having a hard time thinking about anything but embryos this morning without you bringing it up.”
Blinding him with science. She was so damn sexy. “Hey. Put it aside for the moment. Enjoy Mackenzie and Drew’s day.”
“You sound calm.” She didn’t. Confused, sure. Panicky, definitely.
“Mission accomplished,” he muttered.
They headed for the location Mackenzie and Drew had chosen for their pictures, a wooden-railed viewpoint with a stunning vista of Sutter Creek and Moosehorn Lake. Teetering on her high heels as she followed the tree-lined path, Lauren linked her hands around his forearm. “These pictures will be beautiful, but I might break my ankle in the process.”
He untangled his arm from her grasp and gripped her around her shoulders. “I could carry you.”
She stopped walking, jaw hanging open as if he’d lost his mind.
Not far from the truth, really. “What? Drew picked up Mackenzie fifty yards back.” The happy couple were the only ones ahead of them. The wedding guests were heading for the chairlift that would take them down to the cocktail party at the mid-station Creekview Lodge, and his mother and Edward Dawson trailed behind with Cadie, Ben and the slow-moving, injured Zach Cardenas.
“They just got married, Tavish. He’s supposed to carry her around. If you did the same for me, people would talk. They already are, I’m sure.”
“No one cares what we do, Lauren.” He figured if he said the words with enough force, they’d become true. “Did you enjoy the ceremony?”
She gripped his arm tighter and started walking again, gaze affixed to the ground. “You wrecked it for me.”
“Huh?” He figured between holding her up on their walk down the aisle, and helping her along now, all he’d done was stop her from falling over.
“I kept getting distracted by the mental picture of looking like Mackenzie come winter.”
Tavish’s gut tensed. “My thoughts might have drifted in that direction over the past forty-eight hours.”
They walked silently for twenty more yards or so until they caught up to Mackenzie and Drew and the wedding photographer. Having their pictures taken prevented them from having any more private conversations. As much as he would have loved to, with being in the wedding party Tavish wasn’t able to do all the photography for the wedding, but he did take the portraits of Mackenzie and Drew by themselves. As he snapped frame after frame, he recognized the looks of bliss on their faces as the same one he’d worn for the first five days of his own marriage. But they would manage to make those looks stick. Wouldn’t fail like Tavish had.
Chapter Nine
In the corner of the turquoise-spritzed lounge of the Creekview Lodge, a pair of musicians played an acoustic guitar rendition of “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered.” Lauren decided it was her theme song. She fit the definitions of all three of those words, and was closing in on bedraggled, beleaguered and besieged. Her hair had wilted during the speeches, and she was tired of talking to people who were being overly polite and obviously not asking her about Tavish. All the while their eyes glinted with curiosity.
Lauren sneaked out one of the sliding doors onto the balcony. She didn’t begrudge her brother his lot in life, swaying to the music with his new wife. He deserved to fall in love and be happy about fatherhood and marriage and having a job he loved. But everything about today reminded her about how she had the opposite.
There was no point in falling in love with Tavish again. Parenthood would be mostly on her shoulders—he’d float in between trips to maintain a connection with their child, but not with her. Cadie was right: Tavish saying he loved her wasn’t enough. The words needed actions to mean anything.
The night air, still warm despite the setting sun, provided no relief from the sweat trickling under her strapless bra. She skirted behind the cluster of chairs arranged for the post-dusk fireworks and headed to one of the wooden staircases. Diamond-patterned metal grates lined the steps. Necessary to stop skiers from slipping, but treacherous for summer heels. Clinging to the cedar railing, she minced her way from the deck to the ground below. She didn’t want to miss the fireworks, but wanted to watch them alone. She squinted in the dim light and found her way around to the picnic tables on the west side of the building. Climbing onto the nearest table of the group, she hiked her dress up enough to allow her to sit cross-legged. She tugged off her shoes and rubbed the balls of her feet.
As perfect as things were going to get. Removing articles of clothing couldn’t alleviate the ache in her chest.
The sunset blended peach into pink into mauve, a gift for the eyes. Tavish could do wonders with this display of color. How could someone so capable of capturing beauty not be willing to create the wonder of a marriage or a united family? But deep down she knew why. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to. It was that he didn’t believe he could. If time travel were possible, going back a few decades and tearing a strip off Tavish’s father for having jerked his family around would be one of her first stops. But fantasizing wouldn’t actually result in Tavish dealing with his issues. In him being an equal, committed partner.
Her eyes welled. Pulling her legs to her chest, she dropped her forehead onto her knees. The silk hem of her dress substituted for a tissue, absorbing her tears. She gently dabbed at her eyes with her fingertips. Her waterproof mascara would hold out, but the soft, brown eyeshadow was a goner. She gave up trying to look good and wiped with her thumbs until no trace of tears remained on her face.
The crunch of dress shoes on dirt approached from around the corner of the lodge.
She didn’t need to ask who it was. Struggling to control her jagged breathing, she raised her voice to make sure it carried. “You followed me?”
“Yeah,” Tavish called, voice low. He finally appeared—all half-disassembled tuxedo, rangy bo
dy and chiding expression. “You shouldn’t be out here by yourself. You might run into a bear. And no one has any reason to come to this side of the building.”
“That was the point. And I’d rather take on a bear than wedding guests.”
“Me, too.” Hands jammed into his pants’ pockets, he stopped in front of the table. He’d lost his jacket after the speeches, and had removed his tie and rolled up his shirtsleeves since she’d last seen him dancing with his mother.
Too freaking sexy. She cleared her throat. “You weren’t bamboozled into getting the show preserved in pictures?”
“Bamboozled?” A grin spilled light into his eyes. He climbed up on the table and settled behind her. His bent legs cradled her own. “No, my camera’s retired for the night. The other photographer is competent enough.”
She stayed tilted forward—though tempting, leaning back was a display of affection that would lead into dangerous territory. He rested his hands on her shoulders, massaging them with capable fingers.
Her flesh heated, went pliable. She stifled the moan threatening to erupt.
He pressed a thumb into a tender knot.
“Ahh,” she groaned.
“Sorry. You’re tight.”
Yup, her muscles were wound to match her brain. “And I came out here to get some time away from everyone. Including you.” Especially you. “No offense. But I’m hitting my limit for the day.”
His hands stilled, solid and warm on her bare shoulders. “Guess I didn’t help matters last night.”
Her disbelieving snort echoed across the picnic area.
Dropping his forehead between her shoulder blades, he exhaled. “Hopefully, I won’t make as much of a mess of helping out with your family’s business as I have of our personal lives. Not that I’m taking all the credit here. It’s unfortunate we can’t find middle ground. But that’s not new.”
His words lacked true inflection, sounded over-rehearsed. As speeches went, she’d preferred his first of the evening, when he’d sweetly toasted his sister. She reached back with a hand, wove her fingers into his wavy mess of hair. “It’s not about middle ground anymore. It’s about creating security for our child.”