by Cait London
The diary could be anywhere in the boxes. With a sigh, Carly sat on the floor and tugged a box near her. She hefted out an assortment of worn dolls and toys and albums, then opened another box, prowling through it. Logically, the diary should have been with the old albums, but it wasn’t. Nor was it in a box of recipe books. The next box was an empty heart-shaped candy box. Tucker had given it to her and after making her way to the bottom of the box, she had broken out in the biggest zit on her nose—just before she was to be crowned Queen of the Sweetheart Ball.
The box contained all the penny valentines that Tucker had given her since they were children. She’d treasured each one, even when the designs had become more romantic in their teens.
She traced Tucker’s first attempt at making a T, inside a lopsided pencil heart that had been erased and redrawn more than once. “I like to kiss you,” he’d written in the seventh grade, when she was in the sixth. “Let’s go steady,” he’d written as a high school freshman and the future athletic star of Toad Hollow High School. As a junior, it was “Wear my ring. You’ve always been my girl and you always will be.”
In his senior year, Tucker had chosen a big, pretty valentine and had simply written, “I love you.”
And a year after that, it was a huge valentine, which did not erase Tucker’s rendezvous with the town hottie and older woman, Ramona.
This happened during the Walker family’s two-week, “once in a lifetime” vacation to Florida—because Carly’s parents were afraid it would be their last chance for a family vacation. She’d come back to her senior year and the discovery that Tucker had seen Ramona. “I’m sorry,” he’d written. “You know what for. Nothing happened. I love you.”
He’d torn the heart out of her. That chip in her trust for him could erupt at any minute—like the night she found Simon Gifford dead at the Last Inn Motel. Tucker’s “innocent” date with Ramona was always there. However, back then his hot back seat kissing and petting with Carly had assured her that he didn’t have any need for another woman—or so she thought.
On their wedding night, she discovered the truth—that Tucker already knew exactly what would happen between them. He’d done The Deed with Ramona.
The hours of overtime that Carly had worked in order to carve out this two-week niche in Toad Hollow, and the hard day she’d had emotionally slid over her heavily. She could barely wrangle up the energy to put the lid on the box of valentines from Tucker, or to plow through any more unpleasant memories of how they had argued in their marriage.
She was dead tired, but she would wait for Tucker. She would run him down, if she had to, but she would have her answers, Carly decided, as a yawn took her head back to rest on the soft, familiar bed.
She awoke to the old dollhouse poking her in the head, a telephone ringing somewhere and her body aching from a night on the hard floor. She was also sweaty from the weight of the hand-stitched quilt covering her. Carly pushed it away and tried to focus. The telephone kept ringing while she discovered early morning sliding through the lace certains and that her cheek ached from using her rag doll as a pillow. And she still didn’t know why her grandmother had sold the house to Tucker….
Carly scrambled to her feet, tangled in the heavy quilt and stubbed her toe on the bed’s leg as she tried to find the telephone. As she hopped by Livingston in the living room, he squawked cheerfully, “Hi, Carly. Feed me.”
“I’ll get back with you later.” She had to answer the telephone before Tucker—if he was in the house—because she’d told Gary, her almost-fiancé that she’d be installed and rested in her grandmother’s house this morning. Gary wouldn’t expect her to be with her ex-husband.
Tucker was probably already at work, she decided, as she hurried through the living room and kitchen—but the least a construction company owner and a small-businessman could do was to have a message machine.
The sound came from Anna Belle’s bedroom and Tucker was still there. He groaned and rolled over to reach the telephone on the bedside table….
Carly made a dive for it across Tucker’s body, and half-awake, he caught her with one hand and reached for the telephone with the other.
“Give me that. Don’t say anything,” she whispered desperately and struggled against his grasp on her waist; the rest of her body dangled down the side of the bed. She braced her hands on the floor and tried to turn to glower up at him.
And there was something definitely very hard and big beneath the covers separating her stomach from Tucker’s body and it wasn’t his hipbones.
He suddenly released her and Carly was forced to hand-walk until the rest of her body came off the bed. She scrambled to her feet, but not before Tucker drawled in his husky, drowsy, morning tone, “No, this isn’t Carly. This is her ex-husband. She’s here somewhere…ouch, Carly! Take it easy, will you? That is no place to put a knee into a man.”
Chapter 3
Tucker tossed down the receiver and pushed out of bed, leaving Carly to frantically search through the sheets. When she lifted the receiver, the line was empty, hissing at her, and she could almost feel Gary’s anger from Colorado.
She knew what Gary probably thought, courtesy of Tucker—that she’d spent the night with her ex-husband! In his bed!
She hurriedly dialed Gary’s office number and his home number and then his cell phone number. She left urgent messages, asking him to call her immediately.
Carly automatically translated Livingston’s parrot-squawk, coming from the living room: “Five o’clock. Wake up. This is a dark hell. Get me out.”
“You owe me for those phone calls you just made,” Tucker stated darkly from the doorway. He was wearing boxer shorts and nothing else. Carly remembered that during their married days he’d switched from jockey shorts to wearing boxers in preparation for the babies he wanted. Tucker didn’t want his sperm crowded, fearing that they would forget how to be active and swim upstream.
But Carly hadn’t been ready for babies. She’d only gotten married because of The Incident. At eighteen, she wasn’t certain yet just who she was, except Billy Walker’s troublesome daughter and Tucker Redford’s steady girlfriend and the town legend, of course.
The telephone rang again, and Carly dived for it, landing across the bed. “Hi, Gary. I’m so glad you called. This isn’t as it seems…. Oh, hello, Jimmy. Yes, I know you run the garage now. Okay, I’ll tell Tucker that you’ll swing by and deliver his truck right away.”
“I would have brought it last night, but your car was in the driveway. I figured you two wanted privacy…that old romance-thing, you know. Glad you’re back with Tucker, Carly. He was always the only one who could handle you. You’re a fast mover. You need a real leveler like him.”
“Tucker loves Carly,” Livingston added.
“It’s not like that, Jimmy. I just came back for my grandmother’s house. And I have a boyfriend, and it isn’t Tucker. I might even marry Gary.”
Jimmy chuckled. “Sure. Tell another one. ‘Marry Gary’ sounds like some corny song. I doubt that another man could keep up with you.”
Carly leveled a bottom-line order at Jimmy: “You just tell everyone who’s interested that I did not sleep with Tucker last night.”
“Sure,” Jimmy said amid a disbelieving chuckle.
When Carly hung up the telephone, Tucker’s scent was on the sheets and the pillow that she was hugging. Once Carly realized she was sniffing the pillow and getting that melting feeling only Tucker could arouse in her, she scrambled off the bed and straightened her clothing.
She found Tucker in the kitchen, standing in his shorts, starting to make breakfast.
Carly tried not to think about the reason he had changed from jockey-style to boxers.
While she tried to find words to scathe him for the impression he’d given Gary, Tucker sent her a narrowed look. “I’m not having a conversation with you before I eat. Do you want orange juice?”
The reduce-him-to-rubble words were in her, bubbling and heating. Meanwhile, Tucker took
a pitcher from the refrigerator and poured two huge glasses of juice. He let them sit on the counter while he slapped bacon into skillet. With the ease of an expert chef, he cracked an egg on a bowl, opened it with one hand, and dropped it into the bowl. He added more eggs and whisked milk into them.
When they were in another skillet and the toaster was set, he flipped the bacon, shoved it aside and poured in a mountain of frozen potato home fries.
The whole process took her back to when he was disgusted because she couldn’t cook home-style dishes like his mother. There they were, high on sexual marathons, and not a clue how to tend to everyday domestic needs…. Now Tucker was cooking….
She still couldn’t. And neither could her mother. Rebecca had never been a domestic, or a particularly loving, woman.
While Carly struggled with the transition of awakening on the floor, the telephone call she’d missed, and Tucker cooking, the telephone rang again.
“That would be your friend, Gary Whats-His-Name,” Tucker said.
“Gary Kingsley. He’s an up-and-coming executive in advertising. We’re dating. It’s getting serious.” She hurried into the bedroom and picked up the telephone.
The excited and happy woman at the other end of the line was Mrs. Storm. “I just want to say how happy I am that you’ve come back to Tucker, just like Anna Belle always wanted.”
“I’m not back with Tucker. We’re just sorting my grandmother’s things. Some of it I want to go to my mother, and the Last Inn is closed.”
“Goodness, dear. There’s a new motel at the other end of town—the Taj Mahal. Real spiffy. You zipped into town so fast to visit your grandmother and then you were grieving so, you probably didn’t notice. Or you could have stayed with anyone who knows and loves you, you little scamp. Oh, I know how a woman acts when she’s set to snare a prize like Tucker. He’s had some nice girlfriends—”
For the first time, Carly noted the box lid on Tucker’s bedside table. It contained several barrettes and ponytail bands and a brush with several long blond hairs. He was tending another woman. He’d laughed at Carly’s notion of a lover brushing her hair…just the way she’d seen it done in romantic movies.
She pushed that nettling, hurtful tidbit away and politely ended the conversation with Mrs. Storm. Whatever Tucker did with other women was no longer Carly’s business, she told herself.
In the kitchen, Tucker had filled his plate and sat at the table, drinking his orange juice. He ran his finger around the rim of the glass. The resulting squeak raised the hairs on Carly’s neck.
“I suppose that was Gary,” he said.
“Yes, everything is settled now, no thanks to you,” she lied. “You really should get another telephone in here.” Tucker did not need to know that he threatened every relationship she’d ever had. Even when he was nowhere near, he came between her and the men she decided she wanted. She planned to seduce Gary, just to get the last remnants of Tucker’s lovemaking out of her system—and to nab Gary as a husband, of course. She wondered who was Tucker’s naturally blond girlfriend, the one who was sleeping in his bed and whose hair he brushed just like in the romantic movies.
“No need for another telephone. Help yourself.”
“Aren’t you going to work?”
“Tyrell and I are going fishing. My brother and I usually do on Saturday mornings. I only get up early to feed and take the cover off Livingston. That bird sure does unload a lot. It’s a good thing I take the daily newspaper.”
Seated across the table from Tucker, Carly devoured her breakfast. Tucker eased back in his chair to study her.
“I bought this house from Anna Belle five years ago,” Tucker stated slowly. He glanced at the window as his truck passed slowly down the alley to his backyard. Jimmy was craning his neck to see inside the house. Still trying to peer inside Tucker’s house, Jimmy walked past the window on his way back to the street. A car door slammed, signifying that Jimmy was collected by someone else.
“And just why did my grandmother allow you to buy this house? I would have bought it,” Carly said.
Tucker breathed deeply and finished his explanation. “Anna Belle needed the money and didn’t want anyone to know who didn’t have to. People involved with the transaction respected that—I made it a point to talk with them. Samuel Lawson handled everything. It was a better than fair price.”
Carly almost choked on the food in her mouth. She forced a swallow and stared at him. “You mean that my grandmother was in need, and she didn’t tell Mom or me?”
“Your mother and Anna Belle were never that close. You were just getting set up in your career—or that’s how she figured it.”
Carly slumped back into her chair, her mind flying. She remembered the new roof, not sagging anymore. Shingles and flooring had been replaced, and new appliances and plumbing had been Anna Belle’s pride. Carly frowned as she thought of the hired cleaning lady, and the bottles of pills by the sink, before it had been necessary for her grandmother to enter the retirement home. Those costs alone would have been—
The horrifying reality of her grandmother’s age and illness without adequate financial resources stunned Carly. Both Carly and her mother could have helped with bills, yet Anna Belle hadn’t turned to them; she hadn’t asked for help. “I didn’t know.”
“You look like hell,” Tucker said pleasantly, before he stood up and took his dishes to the sink and began washing them. “Now get your stuff and get out.”
Carly stood and stared at Tucker, just the way she had when she was twelve and Fluffy, her pet hamster had died. She seemed to hang there, as if someone needed to anchor her, to hold her. Those big honey-brown eyes were soft with pain. Even worse was the slight trembling of her soft lips.
Life was more complicated now with Carly-the-woman than staging the best-ever funeral and burying the hamster’s shoebox where he could overlook Toad Hollow.
“I don’t know what to do,” she said unevenly as she visibly struggled to recover. “I didn’t know anything about all this, or I would have helped. I can make a living anywhere, and I could have come back to care for her. She seemed to like the retirement home even though she didn’t want to die there. Her friends were there—some of them, and they liked to gossip about the old days and play poker. Mom would have helped with finances, no matter the differences between her and Grams.”
Tucker recognized Carly’s next expression from their childhood, dating and marriage experiences. She had found her solid emotional footing, dropped the sorrow, and was now getting really worked up. She firmed her convictions and in another heartbeat she launched them at him. “Tucker, you do owe me for saving your life. I’d think you could at least let me say goodbye to Anna Belle as she would have wanted. Funerals and cemeteries just don’t cut it. It’s a slow ache that takes time to deal with, and I’d planned to work that out right here—in my grandmother’s home.”
Tucker poured another glass of orange juice and took his time drinking it as he circled what Carly had just said. He didn’t trust her agenda. Even though she looked grief-stricken and uncertain and rumpled, Carly always had a fast mind and wanted her way—but she wasn’t getting it this time. The house was his. His drink was finished and so was his patience. He leaned back against the kitchen counter and crossed his arms over his chest. “And just how did you save my life?”
Those honey-brown eyes had turned to the shade of hot dark chocolate.
When Livingston launched into another squawking session about Carly loving Tucker, she stood abruptly and went into the living room to place Livingston in his “dark hell.”
She returned and stood, her hands on her waist, glaring at Tucker. “By marrying you, of course. In doing so, I protected you from my father. Going to that motel that night meant you intended to take my virginity, to seduce me, and my father never liked seducers. If you hadn’t said we planned to get married, we never would have been—because you wouldn’t have been alive, Tucker Redford.”
Tucker frowned a
nd took a deep breath; he always took deep breaths when he was about to argue his point. “Now, back up, Carly. Get the facts straight. We’d just had another fight about me seeing Ramona when you were on vacation with your folks. When you screamed, I ran to that motel room, and found you all dressed up in that Miss Cornbread Muffin bathing suit with the banner across your somewhat less than now chest. It’s only because you’re a lot thinner now than you were, I suppose…. You look bone-tired, Carly, and you’re too pale….”
He recovered from thinking about how someone should be holding her and caring for her when she overdid herself—mainly because he didn’t like that idea. “I was parked outside that night and I knew what that guy wanted—you. You were set to—”
“I told you and told you, Tucker. Simon Gifford told me it was a party for the contestants. I didn’t know what he was planning. And I do not want to relive that nightmare. But I found out on my wedding night that my suspicions about Ramona and you were justified, didn’t I?”
“And it took a whole week of everyone thinking we’d consummated, before I could talk you into getting over it.”
“That ‘But I did it for you, honey’ line wasn’t believable.”
Tucker didn’t intend to swear, but Carly knew right where to shove her barbs. At the time, there was no way in hell that he was going to tell his sweet, virginal girlfriend—the one he wanted to have his babies—that Ramona had laid him well and good. His willpower back then broke under the assault of Ramona’s capable hands and tongue. That night was his initiation. Tucker had learned then that women had pleasure-muscles that didn’t show. “I am not going to apologize for that now.”
Carly held up her finger. “The point is, I married you to protect you. You owe me your life, or at least a few days of saying goodbye to my grandmother’s house—which I thought was going to be mine. She could have told me she was having money problems. Mom and I would have helped—”
“Anna Belle did not want to trouble either one of you, and she knew I wasn’t leaving town. You did.”