Katie blinked at him in the flash of passing streetlights. Though all she could see was the tense set of his shadowed profile, it was enormously apparent he had as much preying on his mind as she did on hers.
"What are you talking about? My not being happy for you, I mean."
"My study."
"I am pleased for you about that." She shook her head, at a loss. Of everything that seemed to be changing between them, her pride and pleasure over the acceptance of his work was definitely not one of them. "What makes you think I'm not?"
"Katie," he said patiently. "I've known you forever. I think I can read your expressions by now. When Dr. MacAllister offered that toast, you couldn't have looked more unenthused if you'd tried."
"If I looked unenthused," she replied, not sure she liked being read so easily, "it's because I thought you wanted me to help you with the data."
There was more defeat in the admission than she'd intended, along with something that sounded suspiciously like hurt. Hating that it was there, afraid of what it might reveal, she did what she always did when something stung and tried to convince herself it simply did not matter.
She was still working on it when she heard his heavy sigh.
"Do you know why I haven't asked you to help me with that paper? I haven't asked," he continued, his voice a low rumble of resignation, "because I didn't want to listen to you make up excuses about why you couldn't come over. I didn't think you'd want to be alone with me."
His last remark brought her head up again. All along, she'd been thinking he didn't want to be alone with her. "I told you I'd help you," she murmured.
"I know you did. But that was before we slept together. Nothing's been the same with us since."
Katie's mouth was open, ready to counter whatever excuse he'd deigned to offer. She promptly closed it, and turned her glance to her own side of the windshield. With his quietly spoken conclusion echoing in the air, she had no defense at all.
"We can't ignore it anymore, Katie. Not talking about it isn't working. Pretending it didn't happen isn't working, either." His hand clenched on the wheel, the tension there echoed in the smoky tones of his voice. "I can't even figure out whether or not you want me to touch you."
They were even. She couldn't figure it out, either.
He didn't seem to expect a response, anyway. He cast a glance toward her, his expression unreadable, then returned his attention to the road.
It was only a matter of minutes before he pulled up to the curb in front of her duplex. He killed the engine, leaving them in a silence so heavy it seemed to press the oxygen out of the air. Even the rain had stopped, robbing them of its beat on the roof. The only sound Katie heard was the anxious beat of her heart in her ears and the bark of a neighbor's dog. After a moment even the dog fell silent.
Unlatching her seatbelt, she watched Mike reach toward the dashboard. He hesitated, his arm outstretched, then he turned off the car's lights. Though his expression was shadowed, it was easy to see he was making no move to get out.
Unhooking his own seat belt, he angled his big body toward her.
"Answer one question for me."
"If I can."
"You can," he assured her, his glance moving slowly over her face. "And no evading."
She pulled a breath, then blew it out. "What's the question?"
"Are you uncomfortable with me because you're embarrassed about what happened, or because you can't forget about it?"
No evading, he'd said. But he didn't say she couldn't hesitate. "Both," she finally replied.
"Okay," he murmured, his voice growing quieter with her admission. "Then let's deal with the embarrassment factor. Is it as bad now as it was at first?"
Thinking he sounded as if he were going through a checklist to diagnose a defect, she shook her head. "Not quite."
"What about the other? The not being able to forget part." The deep tone of his voice turned velvet soft. "Is it on your mind a little less every day, or a little more?"
In the shadows, he watched her lift her glance from his shirt. Her eyes glittered in the dim light, and her skin looked as pale as marble.
"Yeah," he agreed, hearing the answer in her silence. "It's on my mind all the time, too."
It seemed natural to touch her, necessary in a way he didn't care to question. That was why he didn't stop himself when he reached to tuck her hair behind her ear. If she pulled back, if she stiffened, he might have reconsidered what he was about to propose. But she made no attempt to break the contact.
"Maybe we should just give it more time," she suggested quietly.
"Until what? We've stopped speaking to each other? We've tried your way and it hasn't worked."
"I know," she conceded. "I just don't know what else to do."
"Try mine."
There was no mistaking the possession in his touch when he cupped her jaw in his hand and tipped her face to his. It had been possession she'd felt when he'd skimmed his hands over nearly every inch of her flesh, and it had been possession he'd claimed when he'd stripped her to her soul and entered her body.
With her eyes locked on his, it was that knowledge charging the air between them. The thought that he wanted to capitalize on the claim he'd staked shook Katie to her core.
He brushed his mouth over hers, the caress so light it felt like the touch of satin on silk. It amazed her how something that looked so sculpted and hard could be so incredibly soft. He did it again, the sensations he elicited sending signals through her body that had her melting in some places, tensing in others. He'd made love with her only once, yet he had her body responding to his as if they'd been lovers forever.
"See," he whispered, the faint sound vibrating against her cheek as he traced a path to her ear. "It's working already." He slipped one hand inside her coat and drew his hand from her waist to her breast. Her nipple bloomed shamelessly against his palm. "We want each other, Katie. We know each other. If we're careful, there's no reason we shouldn't take up where we left off a few weeks ago."
His mouth brushed hers again, the tenderness of his kiss seducing her as surely as the carefully banked hunger behind it. He wasn't going to put any demands on her that she didn't want. And he wasn't going to let himself lose control with her again. He couldn't have made that more apparent had he tried. But his words echoed in her head, tearing at her heart, and when she found herself thinking she didn't want him exercising control with her, she grabbed hold of what little good sense she still possessed and turned her head away.
Fisting her fingers in the fabric of his jacket, she pushed herself back. She was scared to death of losing her friend. And she wanted him more than anything she'd ever wanted in her life. But not the way he was proposing.
"Being careful isn't always enough." If it were, she wouldn't have a pregnancy test sitting in her bathroom at that very moment. "And I won't sleep with you just because we don't have anyone else."
"It wouldn't be like that," he said, stopping her when she turned away.
"It would be exactly like that," she countered, weary, disappointed. Hurt. And when it was over, she thought, they'd be left with nothing.
"It's late," she whispered, before she reached blindly for the door handle. "You don't have to walk me to the door." Catching his arm when he started to get out anyway, she managed what almost passed for a smile. "I'm not a real date, remember?"
She had the door open and was halfway up the walk before Mike could decide whether or not to follow her. By the time he sank back in his seat, she'd opened her front door, slipped inside and turned out the light.
There was something wrong. Something more than just the mess their relationship had turned into. He wasn't certain how he knew that. He just did. The same way he sometimes knew that he couldn't believe the results of tests just because they were pointing toward a particular diagnosis. It was an instinct he'd learned to trust implicitly over the years.
He looked down at his hands, feeling as if something precious was slip
ping through them, and finally reached for the ignition. He knew now why she'd wanted to pretend nothing had happened. There was nothing to say that didn't just make the situation worse.
* * *
Chapter Eight
« ^ »
"Should I keep these or toss 'em? Toss 'em? Fine."
A pair of jeans that had never fit well but had been a heck of a buy landed on the pile of clothing on Katie's bed.
"How about these?" She held up a pair of pants that had never gone with anything, not sure why she'd bought them, either. "Should they go, too?"
The white cat with the Halloween colors marking his back lay curled like a spoiled sultan on her pillow. He eyed the pants with disdain.
"Good decision."
The pants joined the pile. So did a half-dozen shirts, a jacket she'd worn to death and an assortment of belts, purses and shoes that should have been culled years ago. She rarely got rid of anything. Her old Girl Scout badge sash was stowed in a box on the shelf above her collection of dead corsages and every letter and birthday card she'd ever received. She had her grade school set of encyclopedias and mementos from vacations up there, too—which was why there was no room for anything else in her closet. But this cleaning was symbolic. She'd started it at 6:00 a.m. because she hadn't been able to go back to sleep. Two hours later, she was still at it.
"Have a slipper," she said to Spike, tossing him a mate-less, pink bunny-bootie to bat around.
Spike's ears immediately perked up, but he ignored the offering that landed on the white eyelet comforter. Green eyes alert, he sprang from a coil to leap onto the floor. One more surge of feline muscle and he was perched on her windowsill, his dark tail slowly swaying.
Katie had barely turned to see what had caught his attention when she heard a car door close. The sharp report hit her like a jolt to the chest. She'd opened the eyelet curtains to let in the morning light. Between the open slats of her blue miniblinds, she could see the front fender of a black sedan.
Catching a glimpse of herself in her dresser mirror, she shoved her hopeless hair back from her face and tugged at the stretched-out neckline of her baggy gray sweats. It was totally unfair of Mike to show up when she looked like the aftermath of a storm. Especially when, inside, she felt the same way.
When she opened the front door to let him in, she noticed he looked only marginally better than she did.
"Morning," he murmured, a mountain of hesitation in a cabled burgundy sweater and jeans. He had a shaving nick on his jaw, and his hair looked as if he'd combed it with his fingers a dozen times on the way over. "I come bearing bagels."
He held up a sack, his blue eyes steady on hers. Even in an uncertain situation, he exuded confidence. She used to admire that about him, tried to fake it herself. Faced with his quiet determination as he stepped inside, she simply found it unsettling.
Preferring he didn't know that, she closed the door and turned her attention to the cat mauling her shirt to get down.
"I wasn't expecting you."
"I know."
Without waiting for an invitation, he headed for her kitchen, tension radiating from him in waves as his glance moved from the boxes by her open front closet to the tennis rackets, hand weights and collapsible rowing machine between her dining table and the sofa.
"I would have called, but I didn't want to give you a chance to come up with an excuse not to see me." Paper rustled as he set the sack on the table. "What are you doing?"
His frown darted to the hallway and the mess visible on the end of her bed. The narrow slash of black velvet she'd worn last night hung on her bedroom door. Next to the door was another box. "Are you moving?"
Had Katie not been so busy trying to figure out why he'd shown up so early, she might have paid more attention to the concern behind the question. She wasn't into subtleties at the moment. All she could consider as his agitation crept toward her, was that less than nine hours ago, he'd made it quite clear that he wouldn't mind a little sex along with their friendship.
"I'm just cleaning," she replied, still shaken by his very practical logic. They wanted each other. They liked each other.
She was convenient.
He hadn't exactly said that last one, but the implication had been there. With her, he wouldn't have to go through the dating routine, the hassle of getting to know someone.
He didn't want a real relationship. How many times had he told her that?
"I figured it was time I started doing some of the things I said I want to do instead of just talking about them. Cleaning closets was on my list of New Year's resolutions."
"This year's, or last?"
"This."
She hadn't even tried to smile.
Neither had Mike. He stood six feet away, his jaw working as he studied her face. When Katie was under strain, the natural blush faded from her cheeks and shadows beneath her eyes dimmed their usual spark. He'd always been able to tell how good or bad things were with her simply by looking at her. He'd never consciously considered that before. But he did now. And from the shadows marring her translucent skin as she began fiddling with the fringe on a sofa pillow, he doubted she'd slept well lately at all.
Being careful isn't always enough.
Her softly spoken words still echoed in his head. He'd been staring at his bedroom ceiling, trying to figure out just where he stood with her, when those words had first drifted into his thoughts. Piling on top of them like cars of a crashing train were thoughts of how preoccupied she'd seemed most of the evening, how she'd declined anything alcoholic to drink, her strange silence after he'd unloaded on her about wanting his life to stay as it was.
He'd sat bolt upright, feeling as if he'd been kicked in the gut. The same feeling was there now as he walked over to where she continued fussing with the fringe.
He started to touch her, partly to make her look at him, partly because he ached for the contact. Not trusting the latter, he kept his hands to himself.
"Katie?" he began, his voice raw. "Are you pregnant?"
Her head snapped up. "No." The denial came too quickly for the question to have surprised her. "No," she repeated, abandoning the pillow to cross her arms tightly beneath her breasts.
"I thought I might be. I'd had that sore throat, and antibiotics can interfere with birth control pills," she explained, figuring he could fill in the blanks in her explanation. "But I took a test last night." She hugged herself tighter. "It was negative."
Expert that he was at concealing his thoughts, she couldn't begin to read Mike's reaction. And her own had thrown her completely. She'd expected to feel relieved by the results as she'd stood in her bathroom staring at the little white stick that had come in the box. But what she'd felt hadn't been relief at all. Just the possibility that she could have been pregnant had fully awakened the yearning she'd always had for a child. That the child could have been Mike's only compounded the totally unexpected, totally irrational sense of loss that filled her even now.
Rational or not, the disappointment had left a void she could almost hate him for creating.
Staring at the toes of her socks, she forced a disbelieving little laugh. "I can't believe how disappointed I am over something that would have totally upended both of our lives. But being realistic, we're lucky we didn't get caught. We were never meant to be lovers," she continued, her voice softening with regret. "We have too many differences."
"We didn't have them before."
"Sure we did. They just didn't matter."
She thought it odd that he still looked every bit as tense as he had when he'd arrived. She'd told him he was off the hook. Yet, there was no mistaking his disquiet as his glance moved over her face, and settled below her crossed arms.
The handsome lines of his face were devoid of expression, his thoughts shuttered as he drew a deep breath and slowly let it out.
His glance flicked back to hers. "What would you have done had the result been positive?"
The quiet question knitted her b
row. "What difference does it make? It wasn't."
"Humor me. What would you have done had you been pregnant?"
"The only thing I could do," she replied, wondering what alternatives he thought there were for someone who'd picked out her children's names when she was ten. "I'd have had the baby."
"Then what?"
"I don't know what you want, Mike. There isn't any point—"
"Just answer me. You'd have had the baby. Then what?"
"If you're asking if I would have expected anything from you, the answer is no. You don't want a family. I do. I'd have raised it by myself." She lifted one hand as if to ask what other reasonable alternative she would have had, and immediately crossed her arms again. "I didn't let myself think about it beyond that."
It seemed to him that she'd thought it through well enough. "You surprise me," he said mildly, wondering at how little she must think of him. He might not have sought such a commitment, but he'd never turn his back on his own child, let alone on her. "You're the one who blames her dad for never being around, yet you'd deliberately deprive a child of his father."
"There's a difference between depriving a child of your time and protecting him from being hurt." They were talking hypotheticals. Katie forcibly reminded herself of that even as his veiled attack fed the knot in her stomach. "You said yourself you don't have time for any more commitments. You're a doctor, Mike. Half the time even your free time isn't your own. And most of your free time," she pointed out, "you spend on clinical research. You don't have any more time for a child than he did."
"Are you saying I'm like your father?"
Something had shifted. Katie wasn't sure what it was, but she suddenly felt as if she were standing on an ice floe with a giant crack racing toward her, not knowing which way to jump. As much as Mike admired her father, it would hardly be an insult to admit there were a few similarities between the men. Dedication. A love of medicine. Veiled dispassion in his dealings with certain people. But Mike also knew how much distance there was between sire and offspring.
FROM HOUSECALLS TO HUSBAND Page 13