But God, he wanted to stay here, to feel things rather than just be going through the motions as one of the walking wounded.
Lucas took a deep breath, forcing himself to focus and not linger—even though everything tempted him to do the latter. “I’d better get home before Maizie thinks I’ve fallen off the face of the earth.”
Nikki’s heart stopped midbeat.
“Who?” Her voice was barely a whisper.
“Maizie,” he repeated. She probably thought that was an odd name. Certainly not one you heard every day, he thought. “She’s the one who volunteered to watch Heather.” And then he realized that he’d made assumptions and had jumped ahead of himself. Nikki had no way of knowing who he was talking about. “Maizie was the woman who sold me my house. A really nice lady. You’d like her.”
Mother, how could you? “I wouldn’t make any bets if I were you.”
He didn’t seem to hear her. He was busy trying to remember something. “No, wait, I forgot. I think you know her.”
She eyed him warily. If he’d known she was Maizie’s daughter, wouldn’t he have said something about that by now? “What makes you say that?” she asked cautiously.
“Well, for one thing, she’s the woman who referred me to you.”
She needed more input, Nikki thought. She’d be fair and hear everyone out. And then she’d strangle her mother. “Just like that?”
“Not exactly. After I signed the paperwork for my house, since she interacted with so many people, I asked Maizie if she knew a good pediatrician in the area. She told me she did and then she gave me your name and number,” he told her.
“I see.” She knew how her mother’s mind worked. This was a setup. A round-about setup.
Okay, it wasn’t his imagination. There was something strange about Nikki’s voice. As if she was struggling to sound civil. He put getting dressed on hold for a moment and looked at her.
“What’s the matter?”
For a moment, Nikki actually debated saying “Nothing,” and pretending. But lies had a very bad habit of leading to more lies and even though she knew that, despite this temporary aberration, theirs was just a professional relationship. What kind of a doctor would he think she was if she lied to him about something like this?
Trying to brace herself for the consequences that loomed ahead, Nikki sat up. She pulled down the gray throw that normally made its home on the back of her sofa and tucked it around herself. She attempted to do more than just cover her nakedness. She felt far too exposed making this admission.
“Maizie is my mother.”
Chapter Twelve
Nothing but silence met her disclosure for at least two beats.
And then Lucas rose from the sofa, gathered up his clothes and started to get dressed.
Nikki knew she was supposed to look away, but there was no arguing that the man who she’d just broken all the rules and made love with was an outstanding specimen of manhood. It took her several seconds, even in her present state of annoyed agitation, to force herself to shift her line of vision.
Was that amusement on his face? She blinked twice to clear up what she assumed was her foggy vision.
The expression remained unchanged.
Lucas slid on his slacks before finally responding to her declaration.
“You’re kidding.”
Those were not exactly the words she expected to hear. Nikki wrapped the gray throw more securely around her as she stood up herself.
“I wish I was, but, no, I’m not.” Though simple, the admission was really difficult for her to push out of her mouth.
“Huh.”
She stared at him, waiting for more. There wasn’t any.
“That’s it?” Nikki asked incredulously. “‘Huh,’” she echoed, still waiting. She was absolutely stunned that there was no other display of emotion on his part. She had all she could do to bank down hers.
“Small world,” Lucas marveled almost under his breath. Picking up his shirt, he pulled it on and began to button it up.
Another man, in her estimation, would have been angry, or at the very least, really annoyed. Annoyed that he’d been manipulated without his knowledge by a crafty woman who would, obviously, stop at nothing in her quest for a grandchild.
Yet he seemed utterly unfazed. Was that shock? Or did he think she was just kidding and was waiting for her to declare a theme and variation of “April Fool”?
“You’re not angry?” she finally demanded. She peered at his face for some telltale sign to indicate what was going on in his head.
Being angry hadn’t crossed Lucas’s mind and now that she brought it up, he could only look at her in mild confusion.
“No, I’m not angry. Why should I be? Your mother must have had her reasons for not telling me that you were her daughter.” An explanation occurred to him. “Maybe she thought that I wouldn’t go to you if I knew that she was related to you.”
Now he was making sense, Nikki thought. “I should say that—”
Tucking his shirt into his waistband, he continued with his thought. “She probably figured that I’d think she was prejudiced in her recommendation and I have to admit, I might have been. This way, I just assumed that she was referring me to the best pediatrician she knew.” Adjusting his belt, he grinned at her. “Which is exactly what you turned out to be.”
Lucas was getting it all wrong, she thought. Nikki held up her hand to stop him from going down this errant path. “Wait a minute. You don’t feel that she manipulated you?”
“But she didn’t,” he protested. Why would Nikki even think that? “I asked for the name of a pediatrician and your mother gave me one. Yours as it turned out. I didn’t have to go if I didn’t want to. How is that being manipulated?”
Funny, he hadn’t struck her as particularly innocent. Or naive. Nikki sighed. “You’re missing the point. She set you up.”
“Yes,” he agreed, enunciating each word as if he was talking to someone who had trouble connecting the dots before her and deserved a little extra patience. “With a doctor for Heather. A doctor,” he pointed out warmly, “who was selfless enough to put my daughter’s wellbeing above her own comfort and come over when I called her in a total panic.” He cocked his head, his eyes on hers. “How is that setting me up?”
Was he being dense?
Or was he just bent on seeing the positive in a situation rather than immediately ferreting out the negative? Maybe she should just quit while she was ahead. If Lucas didn’t see it the way she did, she wasn’t going to shine any more light on it for him.
“I’m sorry,” she apologized, backtracking. “I guess I’m just used to seeing my mother from another perspective.”
Lucas paused to put on his shoes, then turned to her and smiled. “You know, your mother really is a very nice lady.”
When she’s not butting into my life. Nikki suppressed a sigh. “She has her moments,” she allowed.
“Mind if I ask you why you have different last names?” Had Nikki, like him, been married before, he suddenly wondered.
There was no big mystery, really. She was so used to it, it hadn’t even occurred to her that someone else wouldn’t know. No wonder he didn’t make the connection, she realized. It wasn’t Lucas’s fault. It was her mother’s. Again.
“Mother was always very independent. She went back to selling real estate when I was five years old. Because she knew that my father’s family wouldn’t approve of his wife ‘needing’ to work—from what I gathered, Dad’s parents were stuck somewhere in the late 1950s—Mother used her maiden name. ‘Connors’ was my dad’s last name,” she explained.
Lucas nodded his head. “Makes sense.”
And that was it? Not even a drop of annoyance that he’d been fooled by the woman who’d sold him his house? “Just exactly how easygoing are you?” Nikki asked.
Lucas looked at her, his expression serious. “When the day your daughter’s born turns out to be both the best day and the start of the worst
day of your life, you wind up putting a lot of other things into perspective and not letting them get to you. My dad put it pretty succinctly when he told me, ‘Don’t sweat the small stuff. It’s not worth your time.’”
She had a feeling that his father had a lot in common with hers. “Sounds like a pretty together guy.”
Lucas nodded. “He is.”
He needed to get going, Lucas thought, even though he really didn’t want to. Slipping his arm around her waist, he drew Nikki close. He was struggling to bank down the very urgent temptation to pull the throw she’d wrapped around herself away.
For a second, he almost gave in.
But he knew that if he did, he wasn’t going anywhere for at least another half hour. Maybe longer.
“I’d better get going,” he repeated, as if that would somehow propel his feet in the right direction. But he still didn’t move.
“So you said,” Nikki whispered.
She didn’t want him to leave. Really didn’t want him to leave. The feeling was so strong, it worried her. She didn’t like having feelings this intense. It caused control to slip out of her hands. And without control, she would very possibly be setting herself up for another disastrous fall. She didn’t exactly have a sterling track record when it came to men.
He needed to leave, she thought firmly, until she could sort all this out.
Nikki brushed her lips against his, then immediately took a step back so that she wouldn’t be tempted to deepen the kiss. And get lost in it.
She wrapped her arms around the throw, which threatened to slip off. “Give her a hug for me,” she instructed.
Lucas raised his brow. “Your mother?” Nikki hadn’t sounded all that happy with the woman a moment ago.
“No, your daughter,” she corrected. Right now, she had something else in mind for her mother and it didn’t involve an embrace.
She walked him to the door. He stopped to linger a moment, wanting to hang on just a little longer to the feeling she was responsible for generating within him.
“I had a good time,” he told her as he opened the door behind him.
“Me, too.”
There was no reason to pretend otherwise. She’d all but laid bare her soul to him. He’d known she was lying if she seemed indifferent to their time together. Worse, he’d think she was playing games. She’d always loathed women—and men—who felt compelled to play games with one another instead of being honest.
Games like the ones the previous men in her life had played.
“Bye.”
“Bye,” she echoed.
Nikki noted, as she closed the door again and slowly emerged from the mental haze surrounding her brain, that Lucas had left without saying anything about getting together again. Realizing the omission caused her stomach to twist in a coarse knot.
Was he just in a hurry to get home and it was an oversight? Or had he deliberately not said anything because he wasn’t interested in getting together again now that they had slept together?
Damn it, she wasn’t going to do this to herself. Wasn’t going to let this happen. Wasn’t going to start making plans only to be brutally disappointed again.
This evening had just been about sex, she insisted not for the first time. Sex. Just cold, calculated, impartial sex, she emphasized silently.
“And don’t forget it,” she insisted out loud, addressing the words to the reflection she saw in the dark living room window.
Taking a long breath and then releasing it, Nikki glanced at her wristwatch. Mentally, she added half an hour to the time she saw there. Thirty minutes was the amount of time she was going to give her mother to get home before she started calling.
Despite her plan, Nikki jumped the gun at twenty-five minutes. Pressing the single number that would instantly connect her to her mother’s landline, she received no answer. She was too agitated to leave a message and terminated the connection.
Nikki kept calling her mother’s number at five minute intervals, hanging up at the count of four rings. She tried for a total of four times before, finally, she heard the receiver being picked up.
She didn’t even wait to hear her mother’s voice before demanding, “How could you?”
Her mother took a fortifying breath on the other end of the line. “Hello, Nikki.”
Nikki tightened her hand around her phone. “Don’t ‘hello’ me.”
Her mother sounded as if she was the personification of innocence. As if she had no idea what she’d done. “That is the proper thing to say when picking up a telephone, dear.”
Nikki wasn’t about to get sidetracked. “What did I tell you about interfering in my life?”
“Not to?” It wasn’t really a question, but her mother framed it to sound like one. Well, she wasn’t about to let her get away with it.
“Exactly. Not to,” Nikki emphasized. “So why did you?”
“But I didn’t, dear,” Maizie protested calmly. “What makes you think I did?”
For a second, Nikki was so stunned, she was almost speechless. Her mother should have been an actress, she thought. “You gave Lucas my name.”
“Oh. That.”
“Yes, ‘that,’” Nikki ground out.
“Well, I had to.”
“Had to?” Nikki demanded.
“Yes. The poor man was new out here. He was coping with everything on his own and he asked me for the name of a pediatrician for his daughter,” her mother told her, sounding as if she was telling one of her numerous real estate stories. “Of course I gave him the name of the best one I knew. I am proud of you, dear. You really are an excellent pediatrician.”
Nikki wasn’t buying this innocent act. Her mother knew exactly what she was doing. She’d used the situation to set her up. To set them both up.
“If you were being so altruistic, Mother, why didn’t you also tell the man that I was your daughter?” Nikki demanded.
“Very simple, dear,” Maizie explained. “I was late for another showing. I’m afraid I didn’t have time for chit-chat.”
“Mother, you would make time to ‘chit-chat’ if the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse were galloping down your neck and it was three seconds before the end of the world.”
Rather than become defensive, her mother laughed, clearly amused. “I don’t know where you got this flair for exaggeration, Nikki. Your dear father, may he rest in peace, was such a down-to-earth man.”
“I know where I got it from. Same place I got my hair color from. Originally,” Nikki added since her mother, once a light blonde, had gone through several hair colors over the years. Just recently, she had settled on auburn. But that, like everything else, was just temporary.
“Your great-aunt Ruth?” Maizie guessed. Aunt Ruth had been the flamboyant member of the family before she died at the age of ninety-three two years ago. “You might have something there. But Aunt Ruth exaggerated because she couldn’t remember the truth half the time.”
Nikki closed her eyes, trying to summon strength. “You, Mom, I got it from you. Although, compared to you, I am a piker.”
“Whatever you say, dear,” her mother said in that singsong voice she used when she agreed merely to placate and not because she actually did agree. Nikki hated when she used that voice. She felt as if her mother was humoring her. “So, now that you feel as if you’ve ‘unmasked’ me, tell me, what do you think of Lucas?”
Oh no, Mother, I’m not getting sucked into your little trap. I give you any encouragement at all, you’ll take it to mean you have carte blanche to set me up with every breathing, unattached male over the age of consent.
Out loud, Nikki said in a calm, disinterested voice, “He’s an incredibly even-tempered man. He doesn’t seem to mind being jerked around.”
“Maybe that’s because he doesn’t think he was—which he wasn’t.” Maizie waited for her daughter to say something more. When she didn’t, Maizie knew from experience that Nikki was angry. Maizie gave it another try. “I don’t see why you’re so upset
. It’s not as if I kidnapped you both and threw you on a deserted island to force you to interact with each other in order to survive the ordeal. Although—” she chuckled “—now that I say it out loud, it doesn’t sound half—”
“Stop, Mother!” Nikki ordered uneasily. There was very little she would put past her mother once the woman got going. “Stop right there.”
“Consider me stopped.”
Nikki wasn’t fooled. Her mother was using her humoring voice again. “Ha! If only.”
Maizie decided to try to appeal to her daughter’s common sense. Lucas Wingate was just too good a catch to throw back into the sea. Nikki had to be made to see that. She actually felt that the two needed each other. Lucas certainly seemed fine when he came home. He’d said that she should have given him a heads-up that Nikki was her daughter, but that it didn’t change the fact that he’d had a good time.
Maizie took that to be a very good sign.
“Nicole, of the two of us, you are the more levelheaded one,” she freely admitted. “Possibly boring, but definitely levelheaded. And this levelheadedness of yours has got to make you admit that I did nothing more than arrange circumstances which made it easy for the two of you to meet. I didn’t make the child sick, I didn’t even make Lucas call you. He was free to call any one of a number of hospitals in this region and ask them for a referral. He didn’t. He turned to you. Because he trusts you.”
“He wouldn’t have even known about me if you hadn’t initially sent him to me.” Not that she was sorry things had turned out this way, but her mother could not be encouraged to keep doing this. “It’s that earth-mother face of yours. It makes it hard to doubt you.”
“Be that as it may—” Nikki could swear she heard a smile in her mother’s voice “—the fact remains that all I did was give him your name. Whatever else happened or didn’t happen is between the two of you. I had absolutely nothing to do with it. Scout’s honor.”
“You were never a Girl Scout, Mother.”
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