Keeping Caroline

by Vickie Taylor

“You have good hands, Matt. Strong and yet gentle. Like the rest of you.” She lifted his hand and hers to her cheek.

  “Caroline.” The word shuddered in the dark.

  “Stay with me tonight, Matt.” Her heart danced at her forwardness. And her foolishness.

  “I can’t.” His shoulders hunched, the muscles hardening. “I have to get on with my life, Caro, before there’s nothing to get on with.”

  Get on with his life. Without her. Damn it, it had been more than a year since they’d separated. It shouldn’t hurt so much to realize it was finally over.

  Leaning close to her, his big, rough, maddeningly gentle hands stroked the underside of her jaw. Angled her chin up until she couldn’t avoid his gaze. “Caro, we both need to move on.”

  “Am I supposed to thank you for cutting me loose?” Bitterness tainted the words even as sorrow filled her eyes with tears again. “For your chivalry, giving me permission to find another man. Hell, practically shoving me into his bed? You’re the only man I’ve ever been with, Matt. The only man I ever wanted. Do you really think it’s so easy to forget—”

  Suddenly it struck her.

  Oh, God. She was as dizzy as if she’d been caught in a cyclone. She hadn’t forgotten her wedding vows. But maybe Matt’s memory wasn’t so particular. He said they both needed to move on. Had he already taken the first step? Found someone else?

  A potent cocktail of fear, jealousy and anger—no, rage—seethed inside her. Hardened her somehow, like blowing sand fused to solid glass.

  “Hey.” His grip on her tightened. “You okay?”

  The concern in his voice mocked her fury. She fumbled his hand away. The watershed in her eyes clogged her throat. Words were beyond her. The best she could manage as she rushed past him was an undignified snort.

  In her tiny office Caroline whisked stacks of waiting bills off the desk, out of the drawers, searching for the papers, a pen. Her hands shook so badly her name was barely legible at the bottom of the divorce decree, next to Matt’s, when she was done.

  Blindly she ran up stairs, groping for the handrail. Her toe caught on the edge of a step. Righting herself without slowing, she pounded to the landing and turned right.

  There was only one place for her now. Let Matt go looking for his future; she’d already found hers. She fell through the door into the nursery and against the railing of the crib.

  Hailey, her sweet Hailey. Her light. Her life. Her baby. Scooping Hailey up, she pressed a kiss to her daughter’s velvet cheek. Despite her attempts to choke them back, the tears broke free. Jagged sobs tore at her throat, left a trail of fire behind in her chest. Tears dampened Hailey’s blanket. When the baby began to fuss, Caroline realized she was holding her too tight.

  She loosened her grasp, but too late. Awake now, and picking up on her mother’s distress, the baby let out a thin, sleepy cry.

  “Shh,” Caroline murmured, carrying her to the window. Behind her she heard Matt’s slow footsteps in the hall. Desperately, she rocked the simpering baby. “Shh, now.”

  As he stepped in the doorway, blocking the hall light, Caroline felt the darkness fall over her shoulder like a physical weight.

  “Caroline? Are you all right?”

  Shoulders shaking, she fixed her gaze on the night sky. But her focus kept coming back to his reflection in the glass. He stood in the hall outside the nursery, as if the threshold was some fiery impasse.

  “I signed your damn papers. They’re downstairs on the desk.”

  “You can’t just sign,” he said quietly. “It has to be before a notary.”

  She made a strangled sound. “Then we’ll go into town tomorrow. Get them notarized.”

  “Caro…” he said, that infuriating concerned sound in his voice. Damn it, he didn’t care about her. Why did he sound as if he did?

  He took a step toward her.

  “Don’t,” she said. “You don’t have the right. Not anymore.”

  In the glass, she watched him come up behind her anyway.

  “I’m sorry. I never meant—”

  “I don’t want your pity.”

  “Hear me out, damn it!”

  She flinched at the violence in his voice. The anguish on his face. Standing in the shaft of light angling in from the hallway, he looked like a Roman god. Golden. Righteous.

  And ruined.

  “I’m sorry I can’t give you what you want. Sorry I can’t be the man you want me to be.”

  His apology lit her up like a short fuse. Shifting a fussy Hailey in her arms, Caroline turned to face him.

  Confusion washed over his features as he took in the bundle in her arms. “What’s she doing here so late?”

  “She lives here.”

  His wheaten eyebrows drew together. His mouth opened, but no sound came out. Hailey nuzzled against Caroline, whimpering.

  Caroline knew this wasn’t the way to tell him about the precious gift he’d been given. Not in anger. But fury and soul-deep hurt drove her on.

  Without breaking eye contact with Matt, she shifted the baby into one arm, pulled up her T-shirt and fumbled with the catch on her maternity bra.

  And raised the baby to her breast to nurse.

  “She’s our daughter. Her name is Hailey.”

  Chapter 4

  “That’s impossible.” But even as Matt said the words, the truth slithered through him, stealthy as a snake in tall grass.

  His daughter. Oh, God.

  Caroline raised her head. Moonlight glowed off her polished red cheeks. “Just because you don’t want it to be, doesn’t mean it isn’t so.”

  “We never—” That wasn’t true. They had. Not often, in their last, desperate months together. But they had. He closed his fists as if to strangle the serpentine flow of memories of him and Caroline together, flesh to flesh, but it was too late. The images had already coiled in his mind. “We used protection.”

  He knew she’d gone off the pill after Brad—after their life together had fallen apart. Why shouldn’t she? Matt had given her little reason to worry about birth control. But for those rare occasions in the following year when they eased their grief in each other’s bodies, he kept a supply of condoms on hand. He always wore one. Even when she’d asked him not to. Even when she begged. Even that last time, when he’d reached for a packet from the nightstand drawer, and she’d cried.

  He’d made love to her, and she’d goddamn cried.

  Though in his heart he already knew the answer, he quickly did the math. That last time had been about a month before she left. They’d been apart thirteen. Allowing roughly nine months for gestation, a baby conceived that night would be…four or five months old.

  It’s just my quarters, she’d told him about the upstairs the first day he’d come to work on the house. And the nursery. One of my little charges is an infant. Almost five months old.

  He should have known right then. The signs had all been there—the new fullness in her body, the fact that she could smile again while he…it was all he could do to hold himself together. He should have known.

  “Condoms aren’t one-hundred percent effective,” she said, sounding like a schoolmarm delivering a sex education lecture to a bunch of randy teenagers. “You should know that.”

  Staring down, he watched his hands fist and unfist rhythmically at his sides, totally out of his control.

  He wasn’t some fumbling, uneducated pubescent. Of course he knew that. And so did she, a sibilant voice seeded suspicion in his mind. She knew.

  Lifting his gaze to her, he found her shifting the baby in her arms. One tiny, rounded fist punched the air next to her breast. Quickly he looked away again. “How convenient for you,” he said through clenched teeth.

  Her back stiffened. “I don’t recall tying you down and forcing myself on you,” she said.

  He thought back to the soothing music in the background that night, the candles on the dresser. Temptation in a lacy, mint-green negligee he’d never seen before. She hadn’t had to for
ce him. Not even close. “No,” he said roughly. “I was willing.”

  “Sorry, Matt,” she said. “You can’t have it both ways. You make love, you take a chance on making a baby. That’s life.”

  “Add some days the odds are better than others, aren’t they?” he asked, his lips curling.

  “What do you think I did? Poked holes in all your condoms?”

  “Yes. No.” He dragged a hand through his hair and pulled at the roots. “Maybe. Ah, hell. I don’t know.”

  The frost in her stare could have burst pipes.

  “You wanted a baby,” he said.

  “And you just wanted a good lay, is that it?”

  Caroline took his silence as assent. She turned around, laid her squirming daughter in her crib.

  She might not have been much of a wife to Matt during Brad’s illness, after his death. But then, he hadn’t been much of a husband to her, either, walking around their house—the house they’d painstakingly decorated together with finds from flea markets and antique malls—like a ghost, hardly seeming to see her, never seeming to hear her. She refused to let him put the blame for their sex life—or lack thereof—on her. Especially when it was that sex life, minimal as it was, that had brought them both to this moment, this argument.

  “My only goal,” she said without turning around, “when we made love was to try to find my husband again. That man who disappeared sometime during our fifteen years of marriage,” she said, her back to him.

  A moment passed in silence, then he said softly, “Then I guess neither one of us got what we wanted that night.”

  Caroline gasped. Her hands stalled a moment in the task of straightening Hailey’s blanket, then continued jerkily when she’d managed to draw in a ragged breath. Much as she hated to admit it, Matt was right, at least partly. The last time they’d made love, she’d conceived Hailey; she would never regret that. But by getting pregnant, she’d also lost her tenuous hold on her husband. On the life they’d once had—made—together. The romantic evening she’d planned in a desperate attempt to help them both find, strengthen, the connection between them had ended up severing the last thread binding them together.

  As for Matt, she had no idea what he’d really wanted that night, but she was pretty sure he hadn’t found it.

  Hailey kicked at her bumper pad. Caroline’s chest warmed as she turned her gaze to the bassinet. The strength of the love flowing between her and Hailey was a tangible energy, seemed to lend strength to the little night-light beside the crib, setting the whole room aglow.

  “Don’t you want to see her, Matt?” Caroline said gently, still smiling down at her daughter. Their daughter. “Don’t you want to hold her?”

  She glanced up to see Matt’s gaze dart frantically around the room, land anywhere but on the baby in the bed. He took a step back. “No.”

  Caroline’s smile sank like an afternoon sun. “She’s your daughter.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said, pulling at the collar of his shirt as if it had suddenly grown too tight and taking another step back. “Just because she’s my daughter doesn’t mean I can be a father to her.”

  Long after the slamming screened door marked Matt’s exit downstairs, Caroline carried Hailey out of the nursery toward the big master bedroom, and the too empty queen-size bed that waited there.

  Caroline told herself she was bringing Hailey to sleep with her for her daughter’s sake. Infants were sensitive beings, and Hailey’s restlessness was no doubt due to the discord she’d sensed between her mother and father. Caroline would keep the baby next to her tonight to reassure her daughter she was loved by at least one parent. On the fringes of her conscious mind, though, Caroline recognized that she was the one who needed the reassurance, not Hailey. She needed to feel loved. Needed a warm body next to her in bed—even if it was only a twenty-four-inch body.

  Matt’s accusations tonight left her more sad than hurt. More aware than ever of the unbreachable gulf between them.

  She should have known better than to expect anything more from him. She’d lost her husband long before she’d walked out of his home with her bags packed and a baby growing inside her. Lost him first to his work, and then to his grief.

  God, she wished he’d gotten angry. Yelled. Cried. Anything but stood there looking at her through those deep, anguished eyes.

  A noise in the hallway brought her to a stop. A shuffling sound, and a light breath. A shadow, barely perceptible in the darkness, moved near the bathroom.

  “Jeb?” she called softly.

  The breath again, shallow, quick.

  She took a step forward, balancing Hailey on her shoulder with a hand on the baby’s backside.

  Jeb hugged the bathroom doorway, his mouth open and his unseeing eyes wide. She bent down before him, put a hand on his arm. He jerked under her touch. She felt his pulse race.

  “What’s wrong, honey?” she asked, sliding her hand behind him and rubbing his back.

  “Is he gone?” the boy asked breathlessly.

  “Matt? Yes. He’s gone.”

  Jeb straightened, his head swiveling toward the stairs that led to the front hall. “Is he comin’ back?”

  “No, honey. Not tonight.”

  “Is you sure? You didn’t lock the door.”

  “I’ll lock it before I go to bed.” She pulled Jeb toward her, gave him a one-armed hug. “Besides, you don’t have to be afraid of Matt.”

  “He hurt you,” he said against her shoulder.

  “No, no he didn’t.” Not in the way Jeb’s father had taught his son men could hurt women. And little boys.

  Jeb pulled out of her embrace. In the dim light, he looked more like a bent old man than a five-year-old. He laid his hands on either side of her face, covering her moist cheeks. “He made you cry.”

  “He just made me a little sad, that’s all.”

  “’Cause he don’t like Hailey?”

  Caroline’s heart clutched. How much of her conversation with Matt had Jeb overheard? And what did it mean to him? The boy’s head injury might have caused enough brain damage to leave him blind, but there was nothing wrong with his thought processes.

  “It’s not that Matt doesn’t like Hailey,” she tried to explain. As if there was an explanation. “It’s just that a baby is a lot of responsibility.”

  “He don’t want no more ’sponsibility?”

  “No, not right now.”

  Jeb gently stroked the crown of Hailey’s head. “I like Hailey.”

  Caroline smiled in the darkness. “Thank you.”

  He looked toward the stairwell again, his brow furrowed. A tremor passed through his narrow shoulders. “I don’t like him.”

  Taking Jeb’s hand in hers and straightening, Caroline sighed. “I know you don’t.” She led him toward her bedroom. One more little body in her big empty bed tonight wouldn’t hurt.

  Damn Matt for scaring Jeb again, even if he couldn’t have known the boy was listening, and for making her feel this way, this alone, this needy, when she’d finally just begun to value her independence from him.

  “Sometimes I don’t like him, either,” she said.

  Matt winced as the Johnsons’ screened door slapped shut behind him. A moment later, before he could make the back stairs, Mrs. Johnson appeared, belting a quilted yellow robe around her waist. Her bedroom shoes scuffed the worn hardwood floors.

  “Matthew, that you?”

  He stopped with his hand on the stair rail. “Yes, Mrs. Johnson, sorry to wake you.”

  She pushed a strand of hair, matted from her pillow, off her forehead. “It’s late. Mr. Johnson and I were worried about you.”

  Matt felt as if he had a balloon in his chest. One that grew larger with every breath. How long he could contain the inevitable explosion was anybody’s guess. He tried to not breathe too deeply. “I’m sorry to worry you, Mrs. Johnson. But everything’s all right.”

  Except that life as he knew it had changed tonight.

  “Oh,” Mrs. Jo
hnson said, pulling at the sleeves of her robe with hands spotted by age. “Well, we were worried that old truck had died on you.”

  “No, ma’am. Truck’s running just fine. I appreciate the loan.”

  He started to say good-night and make his way on up the stairs, but figured now was as good a time as any to ask another favor from the couple who had already shown more kindness to him than he could repay. “I was wondering, if you or Mr. Johnson aren’t busy in the morning, if one of you could take me to the bus stop. I’ll be heading back to Port Kingston.”

  He’d decided before he’d cleared the front stairs of Caroline’s house on his way out. He couldn’t stay here. She wouldn’t expect him to. Hell, she probably wouldn’t let him back in the front door even if tried, after tonight.

  The divorce papers were no good now. They didn’t cover custody arrangements or child support. He had to go back to Port Kingston to get the lawyer to draw up a new set. He’d just mail them to Caroline when they were ready. In the meantime, he’d find a local contractor to finish the work on the farmhouse.

  Mrs. Johnson looked over her shoulder to where Mr. Johnson appeared behind her, belting his own robe—a threadbare flannel. The elderly man’s knobby knees poked through the slit in front. Matt bit back a grin despite himself.

  “Ed, Matthew says he’s leaving in the morning.” Mrs. Johnson’s voice wobbled just a bit. Age? Or was she really sorry to see him go? He had to admit, he’d grown fond of his elderly landlords, himself.

  “That so, boy?” Mr. Johnson asked, squinting up at him.

  Matt nearly smiled again. Not many people called him “boy” these days. “Yes, sir.”

  “Takin’ that wife of yours home with you?”

  Matt felt a furious flush climb his neck. “Ah, no sir,” he said.

  Mrs. Johnson said, “I’ll put some coffee on,” and Mr. Johnson scraped a chair out from the kitchen table. Pulling a ceramic mug from a lazy Susan, he sat heavily and tapped the table in front of the chair next to him with his index finger. “Sit,” he ordered. The man’s voice sounded very much like Matt’s grandfather’s, minus the German accent. It was a voice one didn’t argue with.