Taking Her Time

by Cait London

  She amended the “never lied” fact. Tucker’s “innocent date” with Ramona hadn’t exactly been true.

  When she heard the jail’s back door scrape open, Carly said unevenly, “I feel like I’m in pieces.”

  Norma’s silence caused Carly to turn and look at the lady police-person, whose expression of sympathy was quickly shielded. “Uh-huh. I have to go home and fry up these fish. I’d rather you didn’t sit on the jail’s porch all night. Here’s a plastic sack. Put the fish heads and guts in the trash can before you leave. Go home.”

  “I have no home. You’ll have to arrest me for vagrancy. Can I stay in the jail all night?”

  “No.” The door closed and the alley’s shadows deepened into night and Carly was alone.

  And Tucker was taking his newly developed skill for intimacy-talk to his blond girlfriend. Another woman would be sharing it with him. He was the same and he was different. In the eleven years since they’d divorced and Carly had visited her grandmother, they’d never come close to each other—or said what they had to say for closure. Now Tucker had closed his part and left hers unfinished.

  Just like the need to stake him out and have him. It vibrated deep and warm inside her—the need to have Tucker. His expression had been tender as he looked down at her, and he was all hot and hungry—but there was something else tangling between them….

  Carly sighed deeply and wearily cleared the jail’s back steps of fish guts as she reviewed the day’s events—her hunt for the diary, the frantic call from her office, rolling with Tucker on her grandmother’s lawn and the humiliation of being hauled in by Norma had exhausted her.

  So she wasn’t in the mood to see Ramona, the minister’s wife, the mother of five children and the pillar of the community, dressed in tight jeans and a red satin blouse and matching dancing boots. She wasn’t wearing big hair now, but an all-sticking-out-ends cut that framed a pixielike face. “You’re a pitiful sight, Carly Redford. I heard you were holed up back here after rolling on the front lawn with Tucker and playing suck-face with him.”

  “Aren’t there rules about how a preacher’s wife and a mother is supposed to speak? Don’t you have to bake a pie for a bazaar or something?”

  Ramona’s laughter ricocheted off the alley’s brick walls. “You’ve been running away from a talk with me for years. Now, maybe you’ll listen. Let me give you a ride back to Anna Belle’s. You can clean up and we’ll go dancing. If there’s one thing I’ve learned about life, it’s that when you think you can’t face the world, you’d just better get up and do just that.”

  After a deep breath, Ramona continued, “Of course, I wanted that fine young stud years ago, but he was hot for you and he resisted. But I nailed him one night when he was down and missing you. I knew when you came back from that weekend honeymoon and glared at me, that he’d finally told you. I knew you’d settle in and dig at that until you made him pay. You weren’t in a listening mood then, or later. Then you up and took off and left this whole mess simmering. I’ve had to live with it.”

  Ramona walked to Carly and studied her. “Maybe I’d better put a tarp on my car seat before you sit down…. Don’t you dare lay any more guilt on me, Carly. I do not want to feel guilty about you and Tucker one day longer. Now pick yourself up and let’s go dancing.”

  “I can’t. Tucker just said something that really got me. I don’t know how to take it. He didn’t give me a chance for a comeback.”

  “If Tucker said it, he’s thought it through and he means it, bottom-line.”

  “I can’t go dancing.”

  “Sure, you can. You’re the town legend. People expect anything from you. It’s been real dull here without you. I need you to take the pressure off me. Their expectations are getting pretty high.”

  Ramona’s spiffy little red convertible sportscar wasn’t the typical minister’s wife’s station wagon. She whipped around the city blocks until they squealed to a stop behind Carly’s rented car at Anna Belle’s house. While Carly showered, Ramona picked out dancing gear and laid it across Tucker’s mussed bed. “You should use that bed, with Tucker in it, and loosen up a bit. Your neck got stiffer every time you came home to visit, or I would have told you about having Tucker sooner. Don’t think for a minute that it was his fault. I knew what I was doing. He didn’t.”

  Carly stood still beneath the cosmetics that Ramona applied to repair her crying jag. “I’ve got a boyfriend. Tucker has probably cost me the chance to nab him. Gary is sensitive and kind. We’re both up-and-coming business executives. We’d make good working partners.”

  “I’ve got a husband. I love him. We argue and make up and balance out life pretty good. I’ve never looked at another man. Frank understands me, and my need to go dancing on a Saturday night and get my ration of romance without the kids jumping on us in the middle of good sex. They’ve learned how to pick the bedroom lock…. Frank still lights my fire. I’d say Tucker stil llights yours.”

  “Tucker is probably at his blond girlfriend’s. I am not aching for him. But he started something, and I’d like to finish it. And I want my grandmother’s house. I was supposed to inherit it and Tucker bought it right out from under me.”

  Ramona pushed the mascara wand into the tube and capped it very slowly. She seemed to be circling an answer for Carly, then she said, “You’re going to have to figure out what is best for you, Carly. Just do it, like you always do. You can’t change who you are. You’ve just got to deal with yourself.”

  “You sound like my grandma.”

  “Oh, yeah. Well, with my brood I’ll probably be a grandmother soon enough. Face life, Carly. What’s the way it is, just is. There’s no going back. You just have to deal with what’s on the tabletop now, and do the best you can. If your feelings about Tucker are still nagging at you, the best way is to have sex with him and see how you feel after that. You’re both wiser now—and I did not believe for one minute that Tucker was planning to seduce you at the Last Inn Motel. I knew that movie star wanted you and I knew the party would be private. I also knew that I had to get to Simon Gifford first if I wanted to go to Hollywood. That’s how I was back then.”

  Ramona studied Carly in her jeans and long sleeve T-shirt with a red rose on the front. “You look good. But I can tell you, a man dying of a heart attack during sex did not make my day. You’d think that a movie star would keep himself in better condition.”

  While Carly was feeling bruised and tired prior to that knowledge, her agile mind now came to a full stop. “You wouldn’t be fibbing, would you?”

  “The undertaker had a time getting that smile off Simon Gifford’s face,” Ramona answered seriously.

  Carly rubbed the headache beneath her temple. “It’s been a long day. And I never should have let Tucker get ahead of me. I had my chance, but he pole-axed me with how he felt back then. I was so surprised that I missed my chance and made a bid for this house. I should have evened the score and told him how I felt—back then. Now, he’s ahead. I am going to fix that the first chance I get. I don’t like being left in anyone’s dust.”

  “You go, girl.”

  At the OK Corral nightclub, the music blared and the dance floor was filled with two-steppers. When Frank left his partner and made for Ramona and Carly, Ramona gently pushed Carly at him. Within five minutes of meeting Frank, Carly could understand why his wife loved him.

  Tommy and Emma Jackson invited her to their home, and Arlo and Fred and Jace danced with her.

  The band was good, and taking Ramona’s advice, Carly smiled at the teasing about being arrested for wrestling Tucker to the ground. She was woman, she was strong and could meet any challenge Tucker threw at her. Then the past would be closed and she could nab Gary. Tucker could marry his blond girlfriend.

  She was just fitting all the ugly pieces of the day together—and twirling under Frank’s arm—when Tucker and Tyrell appeared at the door. She missed Frank, stumbled, upset a table filled with drinks, and skidded across the spilled beer. Her
hand caught on the singer’s standing microphone and she gripped it for balance. Once steady on her feet, she met Tucker’s cold stare. It cut through the shadows and the crowd to lock with hers. He wasn’t backing down and neither was she. Since the microphone was handy and working, Carly used it, because she was never a woman to lose an opportunity to even a score.

  She’d lost her dignity today, and probably a potential husband. She’d been tossed in jail, cleaned fish and got her sexual needs all stirred up with nowhere to take them. After all that, Tucker had dropped an intimacy bombshell on her and then just walked off. She would finish the day—and the feelings her ex-husband could tangle in her—her way.

  “I’ve got something to say to you, Tucker Redford. You got away before I could finish today, but I am one hundred percent ready now,” blasted across the suddenly silent crowd.

  Her words echoed in her brain. She’d been ready on the lawn, hot for Tucker, and they definitely hadn’t finished. What she had meant was that he hadn’t given her opportunity for closure. Carly felt the heat move up her throat and on her cheeks. “When I was in jail,” she added carefully. “And you said those things about how you feel. I want equal opportunity.”

  Tyrell’s grin flashed, but Tucker had folded his arms and was looking up at the ceiling’s balloons. From across the room she could see his grim expression.

  “Don’t just stand there, sing something,” she ordered the singer and shoved the microphone at him.

  “Same old Carly,” someone said quietly after a chuckle.

  “The town legend hasn’t changed,” someone else agreed as Carly made her way around the tables and people to him. The music began and no one moved, staring expectantly at her and then to Tucker, and then back to her.

  No one was watching Ramona and Frank’s sizzling kiss on the dance floor.

  When Carly came to stand in front of Tucker, his eyes narrowed down at her. That vein in his throat began to pulse, a muscle working in his jaw. He looked down her body, and then back up again to her face. “You yelled?” he asked too politely.

  “Where’s your blond girlfriend?”

  “I left her in bed,” he said after a moment and gave her that cold wolfish smile. “Exhausted and sleeping. How does it feel to be out of jail?”

  That he’d admitted his heart to her and then had gone to another woman for fulfillment shouldn’t have taken Carly aback—but it did. “You have a lot of energy, Mr. Redford,” she managed.

  “What did you want to say to me?” he asked. When she couldn’t find the words to even the score, Tucker took a deep breath and slowly placed his hand on her head.

  She didn’t mean to go soft and wilty, as his fingers gently massaged her scalp, and that sensually hungry look came into his eyes, but she did. Her body quivered just that once and she heard the uneven rush of her words, as if they had been bottled in her for all those years. “I’ve just got to burn you out of my life, Tucker. I can’t go back and I can’t go forward. Not until you and I are done. I’m sorry that I hurt you. I didn’t know what else to do back then. I knew I wasn’t the wife you wanted, and I knew I wasn’t settled enough to have your babies. Every day, I fought against what I wanted—to do more, to learn more, to be someone other than Billy Walker’s daughter and your wife. But it was always there. I couldn’t push it away. Every day it crushed me—what I wanted to be, and what I needed to do. I thought you would be better off without me. You should marry someone and get what you deserve.”

  She had to stop talking. No one in the universe had probably embarrassed themselves more in one day—or in one whole year. But because she had to, Carly added, “Do you know how hard it was not to call my best friend when I was starting out all alone in a new place and so scared? Do you know how many times I almost picked up the telephone to call you?”

  It was then that Tucker cursed. With the quick movement of a strong athlete, he bent and hefted Carly over his shoulder. He toted her out of the nightclub as if she were a sack of grain.

  Chapter 5

  Once seated on the passenger side of Tucker’s pickup truck, Carly bristled and tried to find the right words to shake him as she had been shaken. She crossed her arms and settled into the bench seat. It was just like Tucker to be old-fashioned and not have individual seats.

  She wasn’t leaving the intimacy battlefield to him—not until she’d emptied every last resentment, wrung it out and dropped it on Tucker.

  The truck bore his scent—masculine, certain and dark, with subtle layers of frustration that seemed to bristle around her. Papers were stuffed behind the sun visors, a clipboard lay on the floorboard and the seat was set far back to allow for Tucker’s long legs. A calculator and papers lay on the seat beside her, a contrast to her ultraspiffy laptop and PDA. Safety glasses hung from his rearview mirror.

  Tucker eased those lean legs into the driver’s side. He slammed the door, and locked his big hands on the steering wheel. He stared straight ahead, his face grim and hard in the neon light blinking above the OK Corral nightclub.

  “Have you had anything to eat?” he asked finally, and not that pleasantly, either.

  “One of Ramona’s kids left half a peanut butter and grape jelly sandwich in his lunchbox, on the back seat. It was squished flat.” The little “I Luv U, Cody” note in the lunchbox had almost made her cry, because it was just like the notes she had sent Tucker in the second grade. As a mature third grader and a boy, he hadn’t appreciated the favor.

  Tucker switched the truck into life, revved it and shot onto the street. He drove to a fast-food drive-in and parked in a slot near a speaker. At the Red Stompers Drive-In, teenagers were seated in cars, the girls cuddled up to the boys. This was the same place where Tucker and Carly had come as teenagers and as young marrieds. During their marriage, most of Tucker’s paycheck had gone to fast food and the cafe. Their grocery bill was high, too, because Carly wasn’t able to budget—or to cook.

  Now running a million-dollar advertising budget was nothing—but she still had trouble balancing her checkbook.

  “I’m embarrassed, you know, Tucker. And you’re the cause of my misfortune.”

  “Sure.” The word was flat, giving her nothing, and then he ordered their food.

  They sat in silence—until Betty and Ross Wilson brought their boys to Carly’s side of the truck. Tanner’s and Gavin’s eyes were wide, their mouths gaping as they stared at her.

  “They’ve never seen a fugitive from justice before. Or an ex-con,” Betty explained with a grin.

  “How’s it going?” Ross asked, after smothering a chuckle.

  “Just peachy.” Carly forced a smile. The small town gossip did not observe the protection of secrets and pride. She’d graduated from high school with Betty and Ross and they’d married right away. Between them, they probably rehashed every legend she’d ever made—and Tucker’s steadfast ability to rescue her.

  “You two getting back together again? Heard you were going at it on the front lawn—”

  “No,” Carly and Tucker stated in unison.

  “Then what are you doing together? The boys said that Tucker came to see you while you were in jail, cleaning fish,” Ross, always a reasonable man, asked. When Carly and Tucker were silent, looking straight ahead, Betty discreetly urged her family away into their van.

  The food came. Carly and Tucker ate, stuffed the wrappers back into the sacks, and finished their milk-shakes—chocolate for him and strawberry for her, same as always. In eleven years, nothing had changed—at least at the drive-in.

  Norma pulled in beside them and made her presence known by a loud order into the speaker.

  “I thought you were eating fish tonight, Norma,” Carly sing-songed across the summer air.

  “I’m on patrol. I heard what happened at the OK Corral. Just don’t start trouble, Carly Redford. Back when you were roller-skating and delivering orders here, they almost had to shut the place down. You caused more than a few fender benders.”

  “I roll
erblade now,” Carly stated darkly. “I’m fast. I bet I could outrace that ‘squad’ car.”

  “We’ll be going now, Norma,” Tucker said. When he had started the motor, he turned to Carly and said quietly, “I do not have a blond girlfriend.”

  “You have barrettes and blond hair on that brush by your bed,” Carly countered.

  Tucker squinted thoughtfully out into the night. “Those are from little Samantha Royal. She’s six. I fix her hair from time to time. Her father ran out on them a few months ago. I just try to take up the slack now and then, so she’ll know that men aren’t all the same. I tucked her in tonight. That’s where I was. Her dad had called and said he would come see her. He didn’t.”

  Tucker hadn’t been with a woman after all. Carly tried not to be jubilant, but she was and couldn’t explain that happy, light, giggling feeling. “Fred Royal? The one that you pulled off me when he caught me in that shed?”

  He nodded and started the motor. He reversed, gliding the truck out into the night. Norma’s headlights followed them to the city limits, then turned back to Toad Hollow.

  He drove into the Jacksons’ ranch and parked near the new little barn. “Tommy and Emma are honeymooning at the Taj Mahal tonight, celebrating back to marital sex after the baby. Cute little thing, but she’s got a good strong grip. I think she’ll be pretty good when she starts playing ball. You were. She’s at her grandparents.”

  “A lot happened all in one day. How are your parents?” After a hard day of discoveries and closures, Carly gave herself an A+ for managing small talk with Tucker.

  “Fine. They’re in Hawaii, doing the hula. Dad thinks it’s good for his arthritis.”

  Carly forced a swallow down her dry throat. She eased back against the passenger door. This was the first time in years that they’d been alone and had a civil conversation. She was terrified that the unexplainable truce would shatter. And she had missed Tucker.