The Man She Married

by Muriel Jensen

  “I mean…there was a time when we had fun together. I’m sure we can’t recapture that, but certainly we can manage to be polite.”

  “Of course we can.” And he was going to keep working toward the fun. “Incidentally,” he added, “did I tell you that I’ve arranged to rent a van while my aunt’s here? We can’t get everybody in my truck, and we’ll need room for camera equipment.”

  She looked surprised. “Good thought, Gideon,” she said finally. “See? The spirit of cooperation is working already.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  PRUE AND GIDEON loaded groceries into the back of the truck, fitting them around the table and lamp they bought in a return trip to the Bargain Basement. Prue snatched a bag of cheese and jalapeño potato chips out of the last bag Gideon placed in the bed of the truck. It was past lunchtime and she was starving.

  They climbed into the cab of the truck, and she pulled open the bag while he started the engine.

  “Where’s this gallery that Mariah shows her work?” he asked, delving into the bag when she held it out to him.

  She pointed beyond the common. “About two blocks the other side of the square on the right.” She held a potato chip between her teeth as she snapped her seat belt into place.

  They were there in two minutes. The proprietor, a small, older man in a three-piece suit, approached them as they walked in the door. He had wavy gray hair, a bushy gray mustache and a silky terrier at his heels. It ran to Prue, plumey little tail wagging.

  “Hi, Toulouse!” she said, picking up the dog and holding him close. A tiny tongue licked her face.

  “Honestly, Lautrec.” Pierre Pelletier took the dog from her. Prue and Pierre had served together at St. Anthony’s Christmas tea. She’d enjoyed his company so much that she dropped into the gallery whenever she had time just to chat. “The dog’s supposed to be a welcoming committee, but sometimes he’s overzealous.”

  Prue patted the small head. “I love him and he knows it.”

  Pierre walked across the gallery hung tightly with oils and watercolors, and placed the dog in the chair behind a cluttered desk. On the back wall was fabric art and a case filled with jewelry. Several pieces of sculpture stood on pedestals around the room.

  “Now.” The man returned with a smile. He looked from Prue to Gideon then back to Prue again. “I heard you and your husband had reconciled,” he said, offering his hand to Gideon. “You must be the husband. I’m Pierre Pelletier.”

  Gideon took his hand. “Gideon Hale.”

  “Welcome to Maple Hill,” Pierre said. “Are you staying, or have you just come to collect Prudence?”

  Prue grew tense for a moment, but Gideon replied easily, “We’re decorating the bedroom of the A-frame on the lake. I’ve rented it for a few months.”

  She relaxed, smiling gratefully at him for the truth that neatly shielded the lie.

  “We have a bare spot above the bed,” Prue added, “and I heard that Mariah Trent has several pieces here,” Prue said. “That she’s gone beyond the signs everyone loves so much.”

  Pierre nodded and beckoned them to follow him through a doorway to the right. The room was smaller than the other and hung with obviously special pieces. He pointed to the wall behind Prue and she turned, shocked by the four paintings done in brilliant colors. All featured children.

  Prue couldn’t help the breathy gasp that escaped at her surprise over the skillful, touchingly heartfelt work.

  “I had no idea,” she said softly. “I loved her signs, but these…”

  He nodded, apparently understanding what she couldn’t put into words. “I know. She made those nicely crafted, sweet, witty commentaries on life with cartoony flowers and birds, and I suspect even she had no idea what talent lay hidden inside her. She says she started to try her hand at painting about a year ago…”

  “When she married Cam,” Prue said, unable to take her eyes from the wall of Mariah’s work. It was so easy to see what love had done to her gift.

  One of the paintings was of children laughing on the playground—not sweet, cutesy children, but real skinned-knees, devil-in-the-eye children. Another depicted several of those same faces looking out school-bus windows, and one was of two children, a boy and a girl in a rowboat on the lake. Prue could see Ashley and Brian in their features.

  But it was the fourth painting that caught and captured her attention. It was entitled Quiet Moment. It depicted four children sitting in the middle of a carpeted living room—two boys and two girls ranging in ages from about two to eight years old. The two oldest were towheaded boys sitting on their knees, toy trucks arranged around them. The baby laughed at the artist, fine golden hair in disarray, the strap untied on the shoulder of a pink romper. The older girl was a redhead with mischievous green eyes and a tabby cat sprawled out in the lap of her frilly, rose-sprigged dress. It was clear that in a family of little ruffians, she was…the princess.

  It felt as though she spoke to Prue.

  You’re the one, Prue said in her heart, that I lost. The life that never had a chance to be.

  Prue didn’t realize she was crying until she turned to Gideon to see if the painting had affected him as it had her, and saw that his forehead was creased in concern. He put a hand to her cheek and wiped a tear away with his thumb.

  She pointed to the picture, wanting to explain, but her throat was too tight to allow it.

  He put an arm around her shoulder and drew her closer.

  “The children we’d planned,” he said, studying the painting. “Aaron, Christopher, Lisa and Annabeth.”

  She looked up at him in astonishment, unable to believe he remembered the names they’d chosen one romantic Sunday morning in Maine right after they’d bought the weekend house. They’d been so happy together then—a breakup, a life reclaimed by heaven, had seemed impossible. They were going to have four children, he was going to run for governor, and they were going to change the world for the better, then retire to his parents’ vineyard and spoil their grand children.

  He pointed to the older girl in the painting. “We were wrong about that name, though,” he said. “She’s not a Lisa. She’s a Princess Prue II.”

  He laughed as he said it, then kissed her temple. The gesture was completely honest and unguarded, and something solid and protective inside her shattered. She tightened her jacket around her, feeling exposed and vulnerable.

  “We’ll take that one, Pierre,” Gideon said.

  Pierre took it tenderly off the wall and disappeared into the other room with it.

  Prue stood arm in arm with Gideon for a few moments while she composed herself. She couldn’t explain her tears to him, because she’d never told him. She’d never told anyone that the day she’d hurried back to Albany from Maine, she’d lost the baby she hadn’t even had a chance to tell Gideon about. “I’m sorry,” she said finally, pulling herself together. “I…don’t know what happened.”

  “You probably just never expected to have to look that dream in the face again,” he said gently. “And it was such a good one. But…you can still have it someday. Probably with some Broadway producer or business mogul you’ll be introduced to when you move Prudent Designs to New York.”

  She shook her head and sighed. “I don’t think so,” she said, then moved away from him to follow Pierre.

  GIDEON HATED the grief he saw in her eyes, but knew there was no way he could help relieve her of it. Yet the depth of what she felt gave him a curious hope. If the dream had meant that much—if she hadn’t simply scrapped it when she’d left him—then there was something inside her for him to reach.

  With the painting hanging in the room they’d be sharing for the next few days, there was hope.

  Back at the house, Prue washed the linens in the downstairs bedroom and bath and prepared a seafood salad while he vacuumed and scrubbed bathrooms.

  He finished the upstairs bathroom and stood to find her smiling at him from the doorway. “You’ve really become quite handy,” she observed.<
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  He shrugged off the compliment. “I got you into this. I have to help you make it work.”

  She held up the painting. “Let’s hang this.”

  “Okay. I’ll get my tools.” He left the cleaning stuff in the garage and returned with a hammer and nails to find Prue standing in her socks in the middle of the bed, holding the painting up against the wall. “Is that high enough?” she asked, holding it just above the headboard, as high as she could safely reach on the unsteady mattress.

  “I don’t think so.” He climbed up beside her and held it up several inches higher. “How’s that?” he asked.

  She stepped back gingerly to look, and almost lost her balance, grasping his arm for support. Steady again, she nodded. “I think that’s perfect.”

  He put a hand behind the painting to mark the spot on the wall where the wire hung, then handed her the painting and hammered in the hanger. He reached back to reclaim the painting and slipped the wire onto the hook. After an adjustment or two to center it, he took a step to the side so that she could see the canvas unobstructed. “What do you think?”

  “It’s beautiful,” she said in a whisper.

  It was. He wondered if Mariah had used children she knew to model for the painting, or if she’d conjured those children out of her imagination. Because he felt possessive about them—as though his DNA was somehow imprinted on them. And the older of the little girls could have been cloned from Prue.

  Prue moved in for a closer look, her eyes on the painting rather than where she was going, then stepped on the hammer, lost her balance and started to go down. Forgetting she couldn’t possibly hurt herself on the mattress and reacting solely on instinct, he caught her in his arms and they went down together.

  He’d fallen onto his back to protect her from his weight and she sprawled over him in torturous intimacy. For the space of several seconds enclosed in a bubble of timelessness, it was all so warmly familiar—the squash of her breasts against his chest, the curve of her shoulder in the palm of his hand, the point of her knee riding up his thigh.

  Trapped in the flare of emotion in her dilated eyes, he forgot he was no longer entitled to this intimacy. He cupped her head in his hand and brought her mouth to his. She opened for him eagerly, generously, contributing to his amnesia. He kissed her deeply and she kissed him back. She framed his face in her hands and his hands wandered over her, searching for familiar curves and hollows. He put his hand over her hip and pressed her closer.

  She sat up suddenly, gasping for air, her eyes accusing.

  It was like falling through the February ice on Lake Michigan. And reality was his life preserver. For a moment, he seriously considered a watery grave.

  But there’d been too much emotion in her kiss for him to give up now.

  “Yes, I started it,” he admitted, still flat on his back in the middle of the bed, trying to regain his equilibrium. She knelt beside him, bristling. “But you were doing your part, so you have to share the blame.”

  “I wasn’t planting blame,” she said, pushing herself off the bed. She stood near the edge, looking down on him, her fingers clenching and unclenching. “We’ve always had a certain…combustibility. That’s all it means. We were physically compatible and still are—or we would be if you weren’t so physically compatible with other women, as well.”

  He put a hand over his eyes and counted to ten. As anatomically improbable as that seemed, it prevented bad words from coming out of his mouth.

  “I’ll get the bedding out of the laundry,” she said and he heard her storm away.

  He sat up with a groan, hoping he was going to survive this adventure with his brain and his libido intact. It didn’t look promising at the moment.

  PRUE HEARD the shower running upstairs while she pulled sheets out of the dryer. Her hands were trembling and her heart was still beating quickly. She couldn’t deny the conflagration that had taken place inside her when Gideon kissed her. She’d been like a dry pine in a forest fire.

  She balled the difficult-to-fold fitted sheet in her arms and carried it into the bedroom. She fitted two corners of the mattress at the headboard, then tugged the foot corners into place. Her actions were testy. It was humbling to realize that even though a man had betrayed you in a most humiliating way, you still reacted to his mouth, to his touch.

  The bottom sheet in place, she put the top sheet on, made neat hospital corners at the foot, then put on a thermal blanket.

  She was going to have to watch herself. She’d gotten a little cocky because they’d been dealing with each other fairly well and seemed to have found a common ground in preparing for Aunt Georgette’s visit. It had been easy to forget how dangerous a friendly relationship could be when a man and woman had knowledge of each other’s bodies—and when they’d once revered and enjoyed them so much.

  She couldn’t keep her distance, or his aunt would notice. She’d have to find a way to appear loving and warm without letting him touch her.

  Right, she thought crossly, snatching a bare pillow off the chair. Like that could be done.

  She held the pillow under her chin and began to pull on its cover. There was no easy way out of this situation. She was going to have to just keep going and remember that whatever it cost her in emotion, frustration and exasperation, the benefits to Prudent Designs definitely outweighed them.

  She tossed the covered pillow at the head of the bed and reached to the other one to pull on the case. It was just surprising to discover how vulnerable she’d been in his arms. And how much she’d liked it. She felt a familiar shudder now as she thought about it.

  She tossed the second covered pillow beside its mate and yanked up the coverlet. God, she was pathetic.

  She looked at the newly made bed, ready for Aunt Georgette’s occupancy tomorrow, and wondered where she was going to sleep tonight. Upstairs was definitely out.

  He was emerging from the shower wrapped in a towel when she went up to ask him about extra blankets for the living-room sofa. His hair was wet and in sexy disarray.

  Life seemed determined to torture her. Now that she’d felt his clothed body against hers, she could look at his near nakedness and see everything she’d felt—the long, corded muscles of his strong limbs, the sturdy, nicely muscled shoulders, the broad chest. She remembered clearly what was under the towel, but thinking about it would severely tax her already strained control.

  She drew a breath and tried to appear unaffected. “I was wondering if you had an extra blanket. I just made up your aunt’s bed, and I don’t want to disturb it.”

  He seemed a little edgy as he reached to the pillows and yanked away the bedspread. “Take this,” he said.

  She noticed there was only one thin blanket under the spread. “You’ll freeze,” she predicted.

  He gathered it up and thrust it at her. “I’ll sleep in my sweats. I’ll be fine.”

  “No, I can’t…” she began, trying to give the bed spread back to him.

  “Where are you sleeping?” he interrupted without the faultless courtesy he’d displayed since she’d moved in.

  “Downstairs on the sofa,” she replied.

  “Then, unless you’re willing to climb into bed with me to keep us both warm, you’d better take this downstairs now.” The emphasis on the last word was clear. He’d displayed considerable patience over the past few days, but it was apparently at an end.

  She turned around, part of the bedspread trailing behind her, and made her departure.

  She showered downstairs, pulled on a pair of flannel pajamas decorated in croissants and coffee cups that Paris had given her last Christmas, and folding the spread like an envelope, she climbed into it. She’d forgotten a pillow, but she’d manage without one. She grumbled at herself for not even thinking about decorative throw pillows when she’d been shopping at the Bargain Basement. One of them would have come in handy now.

  She listened to the quiet house for an hour. She heard the gentle lapping of the lake against the broken-d
own pier at the back of the house. Distant howls in the woods came eerily out of the darkness, adding a primitive element to her cozy surroundings.

  There was nothing to worry about, she told herself bracingly. Even though the dog-door slide was apparently lost, a coyote or whatever that was would never approach a house, probably wouldn’t know what to do with a dog door if it saw one.

  In an attempt to distract herself from thoughts of coyotes, she went back to thoughts of her surroundings. Cozy was not a good choice of words, considering Gideon was in a temper upstairs and she was freezing on a leather sofa that seemed to hold the cold despite her flannel jammies and the bedspread wrapped around her.

  Which just went to prove that you could plot carefully and set the scene and pretend everything was fine, but the truth would force itself to the surface. She just hoped she could prevent it from completely erupting until Aunt Georgette left.

  Then she began worrying about filling all the orders taken at the fashion show. This charade was scheduled to take just a week out of her life, and it was intended to do wonders for her career. But what would be the point of gaining a reputation as a designer if the customers who wore her clothes complained about the amount of time it took to actually receive them?

  No. She couldn’t worry about that. Rosie DeMarco would be available to help. They’d fill orders in record time.

  Once her supplies arrived.

  Once they’d scheduled fittings. Over fifty of them.

  The impulse to scream was almost overwhelming. Only Gideon’s ill temper prevented it.

  She closed her eyes and thought about relaxing every muscle, one by one. She’d heard somewhere that it helped induce sleep.

  You were supposed to start with every toe and imagine it relaxing. She did that, then imagined the muscles in her foot and the dozens of trips they’d made up and down the stairs in the past few days.

  Her calf muscles, her thigh muscles.