She could hear him moving around, and imagined him getting comfortable on some bed in a mediocre motel room. He told her about the flight and the lead on the waitress that turned out to be another dead end. They talked about the traffic in Dallas and a dozen other things. She told him about her first day back at The Hill, and that she’d considered developing the pictures she’d taken these past few days, but hadn’t.
“I’d like to watch you do that sometime.”
“You want to watch?” she asked.
“I was talking about watching you develop your film, but I’m open to watching you do other things.”
“You’re a real sport.”
This time he laughed.
She stretched sinuously, crossed her ankles and pointed her toes. It was as if that little butterfly tattoo on the top of her foot really fluttered its wings. It set off an entire flurry of sensations up and down her body. She sighed, and smiled, and laughed when he described what he’d had for dinner. The radio played softly and the fan stirred the warm air. She burned up twenty-five of her prepaid minutes. She didn’t have it in her to care.
“I wish I was there,” he said.
“Put your money where your mouth is, flyboy.”
He groaned as if he was thinking where he wanted to put his mouth. “I’ll be home tomorrow by three, Michigan time.”
“What then?” she asked, surprising herself.
“There’s something I want to tell you.”
“There’s something I want to tell you, too, Noah.”
“Good night, Lacey.”
“Good night.”
Neither of them hung up.
“Noah?” she asked softly.
“Hmm?”
“I’m wearing a white T-shirt you left here a long time ago.”
“Anything else?” His voice had warmed at least ten degrees.
She made a humming sound that meant no. She moved her hips a little and imagined him doing the same.
Moaning deep in his throat, he said, “Make that two o’clock Michigan time.”
She was smiling when the call ended. She wasn’t going to be sorry she’d let her guard down and opened her heart to Noah. After turning off the lamp, she turned on her side, and was asleep with the radio playing softly and her heart amazingly full.
Chapter Twelve
It was closer to three o’clock than two when Noah finally pulled into his driveway on Tuesday afternoon. He parked between Lacey’s car and a little import he didn’t recognize. Patting his pocket reassuringly, he took a deep breath, rehearsed his opening line one more time and sauntered on in.
He wasted his entrance on Marsh and Reed and a chunky woman who looked as if she was about to burst into tears as she faced the stony expressions of his older brothers across the kitchen table. Apparently, the temp agency had sent over their first nanny candidate.
Feeling a little sorry for the woman, Noah smiled kindly. “Sorry to interrupt,” he said to Marsh and Reed. “Where’s Lacey?”
Reed motioned with his head.
As Noah left the room, he heard Marsh say, “Have you had any problems with post-traumatic stress disorder?”
Noah almost turned around. Post-traumatic stress?
He continued toward the front of the house, listening for a clue as to where Lacey might be. He hadn’t gone far when he heard her voice. Following that soft croon, he paused in the doorway of the room that was now Joey’s nursery.
Lacey sat in the rocking chair in the corner. She held Joey partially upright in one arm. In her other hand she held a colorful storybook.
“…and the dragon came charging out of his cool, dark cave, breathing fire. He roared. And waited for the shrieks of terror he always heard.
“A little boy with auburn hair stood looking at him from a meadow of wildflowers. The dragon roared again. The little boy smiled. And two dimples appeared.
“‘Run,’ the dragon growled, smoke rising from his nostrils.
“The little boy didn’t run. He smiled again and said, ‘Would you like to come out and play?’”
Perhaps Lacey felt Noah’s presence. Or perhaps she felt his gaze. For whatever reason, she stopped reading and looked up at him.
Warmth bloomed in Noah’s chest.
“You’re back,” she said.
“I’m back.”
“Is the interview still going on out there?” she asked.
“I think it’s winding down.” He made a sound of an explosion and an accompanying gesture with his hands.
“The first one didn’t go well, either,” she said. “It’s possible they’re being a tad picky.”
He tilted his head. “Feel like taking a walk?”
She closed the book and set it on the corner of the dresser Noah had assembled several days ago. Had it really been less than a week since they’d discovered Joey on their doorstep? Had it really been less than a week since he’d rediscovered Lacey?
Noah reached for his nephew. Settling him at his chest so that he was looking over Noah’s left shoulder, he offered a hand to Lacey.
She took it, and rather than interrupting the interview a second time, they went out the front door the family rarely used. This was it, Noah thought as they stepped onto the porch. This was the pinnacle of step three. Up until this point, he had employed the circle, advance and retreat strategy. Patting his pocket where his mother’s heirloom ring was waiting, he went over one last time everything he’d been rehearsing. He had so much to tell her about how much he’d missed her these past two-and-a-half years and how much he’d changed since she’d returned. He wanted her, and he wanted what she’d always wanted.
They started along the lane. They went west this time, away from the two-track that led to the meadow. He patted the pocket of his jeans again. When he finally spoke, it was to ask a question. “If you could go back and do things differently, would you?”
She looked up at him in the dappled shade on the winding path. Joey was content in Noah’s arms, his eyes bright as he watched the world behind them.
“You mean do something the easy way?” she asked. “Who, me? Us?”
He smiled, one hand on Joey’s back. “Do you remember the first night Joey was here? I pounded on your door and threatened to break it down if you didn’t let me in.”
“I vaguely remember that,” she said drolly.
“I wanted him to be ours.”
Lacey turned her head so fast she nearly gave herself whiplash. Had she heard correctly? she wondered. “But I thought you didn’t want children.”
“That’s what I thought, too.”
Lacey’s heart was racing, her thoughts spinning. Noah had always looked dangerous around the edges, but he’d never looked as dangerous as he looked this afternoon, his hair freshly cut, his face clean-shaven, the truth bare in his golden-brown eyes.
The birds were busy tending their nests in the branches overhead. To Lacey’s ears, their melody sounded like a song played on the piano with one finger. Duh-duh-duh-da.
“You look surprised,” he said. “I don’t blame you. It surprised me, too. I’ve been rehearsing this for hours and I haven’t said any of this the way I’d planned.”
They’d stopped walking and now stood in the dappled shade of an enormous weeping-willow tree. Patting Joey’s back, he said, “When you were reading that story to him a few minutes ago, all I could think was how amazing it’s going to be when it’s our baby in your arms.”
Lacey felt something under her sandal. She wouldn’t have been surprised if it had been her lower jaw. Actually, it was a small blue sock. She bent down automatically. Picking it up gave her something to do with her hands and something to look at besides the naked truth in Noah’s eyes.
“Noah, there’s something you should know.”
“What is it?” he asked, pointing to the baby bootee in her hand. Evidently noticing her stricken look, he said, “Lacey, what’s wrong?”
She handed him the little sock. Turning it over in his ha
nd, he gazed back toward the house and said, “This was where she waited.”
She could hear her heart beating in her ears. It wasn’t easy to hear anything else. “This was where who waited?” she asked.
“Joey’s mother.”
The wispy willow branches arched to the ground here, brushing the grass in the slight breeze. The tree stood between them and the house. Through the fronds, Lacey could see all the way to the front porch.
“Are you saying this is Joey’s sock?” she asked.
Noah nodded. “He was wearing the other one when we found him. This one was missing. She must have waited here with him. It probably slipped off his foot before she worked up the courage to creep out of her hiding place. I saw her. When I was flying over. I saw a woman hurrying across the front lawn. After she left him on the front porch, she probably hid here until she knew Joey was safely inside.”
Lacey’s heart was still pounding with the knowledge that Noah wanted children. A car drove by. It was the woman Marsh and Reed had interviewed leaving in her little import.
“I’ve gotten off the subject.” He smiled at her. When she failed to smile back, he said, “What is it?”
She shook her head. She couldn’t have found her voice right then if her life had depended on it.
“I didn’t plan to do this with Joey along,” he said. “But now I think maybe it’s fitting that he’s here for this. After all, his arrival is what finally opened my eyes.”
He felt his pocket again.
Unable to speak, she shook her head and backed up a step.
“Lacey, what’s wrong? What the hell is it? You’re scaring me.”
Noah hadn’t meant to speak so loudly. Too late he saw Joey’s little lip quiver. The baby started to cry. Noah felt like a goddamn monster. “I didn’t mean to frighten you, buddy.”
Jiggling the baby, he tried to reach Lacey, too. He didn’t know what was going on. What had he said? What had he done wrong? Her face had paled. And her eyes, those forget-me-not blue eyes, were swimming with tears.
She took another step back. Away from him.
At first he didn’t understand what she was doing. She hiked her shirt up. For a second there he got a little sidetracked by the sight of bare skin. She hitched her shirt a little higher and unbuttoned her jeans.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
Her zipper went down. And then, with both hands, she slung her jeans open to reveal her belly.
His first thought was—
He forgot his first thought. For the first time he noticed two scars on her stomach. “What happened?” he said.
Joey was wailing and Lacey was shaking her head and backing up. “I can’t have your babies, Noah.”
She spun around and hurried toward the house.
“Lacey, come back.”
Joey cried harder. And Lacey started running. Noah didn’t know what the hell to do about either one of them. One thing he did know. He had to calm down.
As he rocked Joey to and fro, the woman he loved ran to the house. She went in the front door that not even company used. Less than a minute later she went out the back. Still running, she got in her car. And then she drove away.
Okay. This was a new low, even for Noah. He’d raised a lot of hell in his life, and he’d made people pull their hair out. He’d brought more than one woman to tears, teachers mostly. He hadn’t spent a lot of time with kids, but he might have made one or two of them cry, too. He’d never made a woman and a baby cry at the same time.
He parked in the alley by Bell’s Tavern twenty minutes after Lacey had fled. He’d tried calling her. She hadn’t answered. Her car was here, but that didn’t mean she was home.
He’d shown the baby sock to Marsh and Reed, and briefly explained where Lacey had found it. Reed had taken Joey and Marsh took the sock.
Reed told him that Lacey had run out of the house, crying. “I don’t know what’s going on,” he said. “But go after her.”
“We’ve got things covered here,” Marsh had insisted. “Go.”
It was the best advice his brothers had ever given him. Now that he was here, the adrenaline rush that had gotten him this far lost pressure like air through a leaky valve.
He threw the shifting lever into Park, set the brake and got out. He paced back and forth in front of the barrel of petunias. He wasn’t sure where he’d gone wrong, and while he didn’t understand what had precipitated Lacey’s reaction, the image of her scars and the echo of her voice as she’d said, “I can’t have your babies, Noah,” was embedded in his brain. Once his thoughts were in a semblance of order, he took the steps two at a time and knocked on her door.
Lacey was in her bedroom when she heard the pounding. She’d splashed her face with cool water, fixed her mascara and tied her hair up for work at The Hill. She wasn’t surprised that Noah had come looking for her. As far as explanations went, hers left a lot to be desired. She’d definitely stuck to the facts. Or one fact. She couldn’t have Noah’s babies.
For the second time in less than a week, the pounding on her door got louder. “It’s me, Lacey. Open the door.”
Noah.
She was on her way across the small living room when the pounding got harder and his voice louder. “I’m not leaving until we’ve talked. If you don’t open up, I’ll break the door down.”
She turned the dead bolt and stepped back.
The door swung in. For just a moment, neither she nor Noah moved.
Her breath caught at the sight of him. His jeans were faded, his legs long, his chest broad, his breathing a little ragged. His eyes were narrowed, his jaw set. Short hair or not, he had bad boy written all over him.
“Either come in or go out,” she said. “You’re letting in flies.”
He came in. And he closed the door. He took a few steps, stopped. Heaving a great sigh, he said, “Tell me about those scars.”
She didn’t ask him to sit down. He couldn’t have sat, and neither could she. Heaving a sigh, too, she said, “Six-and-a-half months ago, I woke up with a mild ache in my side. No big deal, right? I thought I was just ovulating, or something I’d eaten didn’t agree with me. I took some aspirin and went to my temp job. By midnight, I couldn’t take the pain. I went to the E.R. Emergency rooms are busy places in large cities in the middle of the night. Six hours later, I was in surgery.”
“What was wrong?” he asked.
“It was just my appendix. Ninety-nine-point-nine percent of the time, appendectomies are routine. In, out, patients are good to go. You know me. I don’t do anything the easy way. There was an infection. To make a long story short, I lived. But the internal scarring damaged my fallopian tubes, the right one more than the left. They actually took a photograph of my insides. It wasn’t a pretty picture.”
She went to the table and picked up a sheet of paper, with line after line of dollar amounts. “This is a little souvenir of my vacation in the hospital. It’s the reason I came back to Orchard Hill. I have to sell the tavern to pay the hospital back for saving my life.”
Noah had eased closer during her little speech. With every step he took, she raised her eyes a little more, never wavering from his gaze. “God, Lace. You could have died.”
“I didn’t. The only thing that died was my dream of having kids. Just because I can’t doesn’t mean you can’t.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You want them, Noah. You should have them. It would be a crying shame not to pass on all those incredible genes. So this is it. It’s been fun.”
Her voice shook a little, but not too badly.
“It has been fun,” he said. The edge in his voice was sharp enough to cut steel.
Noah couldn’t decide if he should wrap his arms around Lacey or throttle her. In the end, he snatched the sheet of paper from her hand, scanned it and stuffed it in his back pocket. “The goddamn fun isn’t over yet,” he said, on his way to the door. “Don’t even think about leaving town because I will hunt you do
wn.”
“You’re mad at me?”
He sucked in a breath and spun around. The floor shook beneath his feet as he stomped back to her. He slid his fingers into her hair and covered her mouth with his. He took her gasp of surprise into his own mouth.
The kiss was neither punishing nor particularly sensual. It was a brand. It was an exclamation point. It lasted only a matter of seconds, but it wasn’t the end of anything.
“I’m mad at you because I love you.”
As Noah left Lacey’s apartment, he didn’t know for sure where he was going. He didn’t have a plan. He wished to hell he did. This was no time to resort to flying by the seat of his pants. What else could he do?
One thing was certain. He would be back, and by God she had better get used to the idea, because after he figured this one out, he wasn’t leaving again.
Chapter Thirteen
Waitress uniforms weren’t required at The Hill. Rosy asked only that her employees show up for work on time and were clean, courteous and pleasant to her customers and each other. The busboys wore full aprons and the waitresses short white ones with pockets large enough to hold an order book, pen and tips.
At the end of Lacey’s shift on her second night, only one customer remained. And he was no ordinary customer.
Noah had been holding up the end of the counter for the better part of an hour. He’d ordered a Coke, but as far as she could tell, the ice had melted and he hadn’t taken so much as a sip. He was too busy stalking her with his eyes.
The other waitress was putting up chairs in the back. All Lacey had left to do was wipe down the counter. As she wrung out her cloth, she happened to glance at Rosy, who was counting money at the cash register. “Choose your battles, dearie,” the older woman said.
Along with a secretive past and an uncanny habit of spouting pearls of wisdom at the precise moment they were needed, Rosy Sirrine possessed the rare ability to raise one eyebrow independently of the other. She demonstrated that move for Lacey while casting a pointed look at Noah, then resumed counting.
There was no sense wondering how the woman could have known. “Noah,” Lacey finally said when he lifted his elbows from the marred Formica surface, indicating that she should clean up around him. “We’re closed. You shouldn’t be here.”
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