Resolved To (Re)Marry

by Carole Buck

  She’d been drawn to him because of this. There was no denying that. But she’d begun to resent his certainty after a time, because it contrasted so sharply with the confusion roiling within her.

  “I...I don’t know,” she finally admitted. “Did you?”

  “I needed you more than I’ve ever needed anyone. You filled up places I didn’t know were empty.”

  Her heart seemed to stop. “You never said—”

  “I couldn’t, dammit! I come from a family where people don’t admit to needing, Lucy. A Banks isn’t supposed to let down, break down or stick out his hand for assistance, because a Banks isn’t supposed to have any weaknesses. I didn’t have the words. And even if I had, I probably couldn’t have brought myself to utter them.” Chris paused, his lips twisting as though he were in pain. “Except in bed. I could talk about needing when we were together in bed.”

  “Because it was...sex?”

  Temper flashed in his eyes. Swift. Sudden. Like a streak of summer lightning. She quailed slightly at the sight of it, but stood her ground. “It was more than that, and you know it.”

  There was a long silence. The emotions that had spiked between them seemed to flatten, just a little bit.

  “You thought there was a problem with our marriage?” Lucy finally asked.

  He nodded.

  “You knew I thought there was a problem.”

  He nodded again.

  “Then why...why did you say no when I brought up the possibility of our getting some counseling? Another Banks family taboo?”

  “That was part of it. But the main reason I rejected the idea was that I didn’t think the problem was me. And even if it was—” he smiled bitterly “—I had the twisted notion that you were supposed to fix it.”

  Lucy shifted her weight. Chris was speaking solely in the past tense, she realized, conscious of a slight acceleration in the pace of her heartbeat. Did that mean—?

  “What...what do you think now?” she questioned carefully.

  “Are you asking whether I’ve changed my mind?”

  It was her turn to nod.

  Her ex-husband gazed at her wordlessly for several seconds, then quietly replied, “Yes. It’s taken me a hell of a long time to do it. But yes. I’ve changed my mind.”

  “I...see.”

  “Do you, Lucy?”

  She blinked at the challengíng tone of the query, her throat tightening. “I—I want to,” she finally managed. “I want to understand what went wrong between us and why. Otherwise...”

  She couldn’t finish. She couldn’t contemplate the alternative.

  Chris expelled a breath and forked a hand through his hair. “Look,” he began. “I’m not going to try to justify that scene with Irene. Or make excuses for it. What I did was wrong. It was...stupid. But my intention wasn’t to drive you away, Lucy. God! That’s the last thing I wanted. What I wanted to do was to get you back. To get us back.”

  “And to do that, you had to get me to pay attention.”

  “Yes.”

  “So you got Irene Houghton to stage a scene with you.” She frowned inwardly as she spoke, dimly aware that there was something...off...about this assertion. Her visit to Chris’s office ten days before their anniversary had been an impulsive one. They’d had a spat the previous evening about the amount of time she’d been spending trying to mediate a business disagreement between her father and her brother Vinnie. She’d wanted to smooth things over. How could Chris have solicited help in staging a scene he didn’t even know would occur?

  Her ex-husband’s gray-green eyes widened with something close to shock.

  “No!” he denied, making a slashing gesture with one hand. “Irene had no clue what I was doing. She’d come into the firm to see one of the senior partners about some business matter, and she stopped by my office to say hello. She’d been there about ninety seconds when the receptionist buzzed to say you’d arrived. That’s when the idea came to me.”

  “The idea of kissing her and letting me see.”

  “It was an impulse, Lucy. The most misguided impulse I’ve ever had. But I acted on it.”

  Lucy let a few seconds go by, trying to digest everything he’d told her. It wasn’t easy. Then she asked, “What did you think I was going to do, Chris? How did you think I was going to react when I walked in and found you wrapped around another woman?”

  And not just any other woman. Oh, no. Irene Houghton!

  “I don’t know that I really ‘thought’ anything.” The response was laced with self-disgust. “If I did, I definitely didn’t think it through. I basically expected you to take it as a challenge. To stand up and fight.”

  “For y-you.” The pronoun snagged briefly in her throat as she considered the implications of what he’d just said.

  “For us.” He grimaced. “My version of us, at least.”

  “But instead of standing up and fighting, I ran away.”

  “While I watched like a fool, wondering what had gone wrong.” Chris shook his head, his eyes bleak. “I pretty much lost it when I found out you’d gone back to your family. I told myself I’d been right. That when push came to shove, you’d chosen them over me. The deal was sealed when I tried to come and talk to you and your brothers and father told me you’d told them there was nothing to be said.”

  “Oh, Chris...” Her rejection of Chris’s overture had been a matter of anger and hurt. It had also been a test. Had her then-husband been willing to fight his way through the Falco male gauntlet to get to her, she would have taken it as a sign that he still cared. But he hadn’t, and she’d been forced to conclude that he’d chosen Irene—or at least what Irene symbolized—over her.

  “If I could go back and undo what I did, I would,” Chris said painfully. “But I can’t. I can only tell you what I’ve told you about a dozen times already. I’m sorry, Lucy. I’m so, so sorry.”

  She blinked against a renewed threat of tears. “I’m sorry, too.”

  “No.” He was adamant. “No! You have nothing to be sorry for.”

  “Yes, I do!” Chris had been right when he said what he’d done couldn’t be excused. But it could be put into context and understood. And doing so required that she face up to her own misguided impulses and mistakes in judgment. “I got so caught up in reacting to how our marriage was affecting me that I stopped asking myself how it might be affecting you. And you made that easy, Chris. Because the more time passed, the less you seemed to feel about anything. I was so sure about us when I made that New Year’s Eve resolution about our living happily ever after. Only afterward ... God! I got so confused about what that meant and how I—we—were supposed to do it. There were moments when you and I were like one person. When I couldn’t separate us—me—out. And that was scary. There were other moments when there didn’t seem to be any connection at all. That was pretty frightening, too.”

  She sucked in a breath, wondering if she was making any sense at all. The words were pouring out, geysering up from deep within her.

  “I should have stood up for us and our marriage—for myself—that night in your office,” she said fiercely. “I think I would have, if you’d been with anyone but Irene Houghton. Because when I saw you with h-h-her...” Lucy broke off abruptly, her control starting to crack. “When I saw that, I pretty much lost it. All I could think was that Irene was everything I wasn’t. That she was exactly the kind of w-woman you were supposed to fall in love with and marry. I d-didn’t take it as a challenge, Chris. I took it as a competition. A competition I...had...n-no chance...of w-w-winning.”

  Lucy started to cry. The tears she’d tried so hard to hold back welled up and spilled over her lower eyelids. They were tears of regret and remorse, mostly. But they carried a tincture of relief, too.

  As Chris had said, they couldn’t go back and undo what had been done. But at long, long last, they’d spoken the truth about it.

  “Oh, Lucy.” Her ex-husband gathered her into his arms, hugging her close and stroking her back.
His voice was thick. His hands were trembling. “Oh, sweetheart. Please. Don’t.”

  “I tried to h-hate you,” she admitted on a broken sob. “And then I tried to be...b-be indifferent. But I c-couldn’t. I can’t. I love y-yore. Still. Always.” She eased back slightly, lifting her gaze to meet Chris’s once again. His gray-green eyes seemed preternaturally bright. “Only it’s not the s-same as before, Chris. Because I’m not the same.”

  She watched her ex-husband’s well-shaped mouth curve into a smile of infinite tenderness. Impervious though he once might have appeared to her, he definitely did not look that way now.

  “I’m not the same as I was, either,” he told her huskily, gently brushing the tears from her cheeks. “At least, I hope I’m not. Because the man I used to be didn’t understand what kind of love is required for two people to live happily ever after. But the man I am now—”

  The slow, seamless swoon begun by Lucia Annette Falco’s heart in response to Christopher Dodson Banks’s words rebounded into a startled flip-flop at the sound of the storage room door swinging open.

  The intruder was Dick Spivey.

  The first sentence out of his mouth was a complaint about Butch Johnson’s refusal to stop battling aliens from a parallel universe and go back to stealing the Red Treasure.

  The second was an angry demand to know what the hell Chris had “shared” to make her cry.

  “Thank you,” Chris said about fifteen minutes later, when it was once again just him and Lucy in the storage room.

  “For what?”

  “For saving me from grievous bodily harm at the hands of Tom, Dick and Percival.”

  His ex-wife laughed and snuggled up against him. “They weren’t serious about that.”

  “You think not?” He teased a lock of his companion’s hair, savoring the yielding warmth of her body. The demons of the past had finally been dragged out and exorcised, he told himself. The future beckoned. “They looked pretty serious to me.”

  “I’m positive. Once they realized I was crying because I was happy, not because you’d ‘shared’ something horrible, they were thrilled. They were just trying to make certain your intentions fit their definition of honorable. ”

  “And a surprisingly inelastic definition it is, all things considered.”

  “Wen...” Lucy felt herself flush.

  “Do you think they were persuaded? About the honorable nature of my intentions, I mean.”

  “Pretty much.”

  “Are you?” He shifted to get a clearer look at her face. He’d spoken of remarriage. He hadn’t really gotten a response.

  Lucy regarded him solemnly for several seconds. Then she gave him a smile that arrowed straight to his heart. “Absolutely .”

  They kissed.

  Softly. Sweetly.

  They kissed again.

  Harder this time, and with considerably more heat.

  “Mmm...” Lucy breathed.

  “I’ll second that,” he concurred, nipping at her lower lip. It would be different between them this time, he vowed. Different... meaning better.

  They said nothing for more than a minute. The silence was fluidly companionable, not cast in concrete. It resonated with a spirit of reunion.

  “Why didn’t we do this before?” Lucy eventually asked.

  “What?” Chris countered. “Get ourselves taken hostage and stashed in a storage room by a trio of numbskulls?”

  “No.” She laughed and made a droll face. Then her expression turned serious, her eyes gazing deeply into his. “Why didn’t we talk, Chris?”

  “We talked,” he contradicted. “Sometimes. At least we tried to. But we kept most of the things that should have been said to ourselves. We also didn’t...listen... very well.”

  “You listened better than I did.”

  “Lucy—”

  She stopped his lips with her fingers. “No. Really,” she insisted. “This isn’t me trying to take on the burdens of the world or shoulder all the blame. Back at the very beginning, when we were first going out, you paid attention to me when we had conversations. It was very...sexy.”

  He lifted an eyebrow. His body stirred. “Oh, really?”

  “Mmm-hmm. Although there were times I worried you might be feigning an admiration for my brain in order to get to my, ah—” she moved her hand in a provocative gesture “—whatever.”

  “You’re not worried about that anymore, are you?”

  She dimpled.

  “Good,” he said firmly. “Because you actually had it backward. I was feigning interest in your ‘whatever’ to get to your brain!”

  They both laughed. Then they kissed a third time. The melding of their mouths was playful at first, but quickly tilted into passion. Neither one of them was breathing steadily when the embrace finally came to an end.

  “I just wish we hadn’t waited ten years,” Lucy said huskily, toying with one of the buttons on his shirt. Once impeccably white and perfectly pressed, the garment was now more than a little worse for wear. “We’ve wasted so much time—”

  Chris trapped her hand and pressed it flat against his chest. “No waste, Lucy. We made use of those ten years. We used them to change. To grow. We’re finally ready for each other.”

  Eleven

  Although nearly everything of importance had been said, Lucy and Chris went on talking for another thirty minutes or so. Eventually, however, the strain of their shared ordeal began to tell. The pauses between sentences lengthened. Yawns became more frequent. Eyelids drooped lower. And lower. And lower still. Finalty, they closed completely, and stayed that way.

  “Love...you,” Lucia Annette Falco murmured as awareness slipped away and slumber enveloped her.

  “Love you...too,” Christopher Dodson Banks tenderly replied, cuddling her close to his heart.

  They slept. He, leaning against one of the storage room walls. She, nestled against his chest.

  What they dreamed of while they slept was not auld lang syne. As befitted the first day of a brand-new year, what they dreamed of was their future.

  Lucy awoke with a crick in her back and a sublimely happy feeling of anticipation in her heart. She stirred languorously within the protective circle of her ex-husband’s arms, wincing a bit at the knot in her spine. Tilting her head up, she slowly opened her eyes.

  She found Chris looking down at her. While the expression she saw on his face didn’t immediately uncramp her muscles, the rush of heat it sent coursing through her body served as a very effective analgesic.

  “Good morning,” he said softly, brushing a lock of hair back from her forehead.

  It took her a few moments to scrape together enough breath to respond to this greeting. “Good m-morning,” she finally returned.

  Chris’s gaze held hers for several heady seconds, then drifted downward to her mouth. Lucy felt a flutter of response deep within her. Her lips parted on an involuntary sigh.

  “I want to kiss you,” he admitted with a hint of ruefulness, his eyes returning to hers. “But I’m afraid my oral hygiene leaves something to be desired. My teeth and tongue seem a bit...mossy.”

  Lucy understood perfectly. She, too, was experiencing the consequences of having gone nearly twenty-fours hours without brushing, flossing or gargling. She vaguely remembered having popped a breath mint after lunch the day before, but its freshening effects had long since worn off.

  Still...

  “I don’t mind if you don’t,” she stated frankly, then gave a throaty laugh. “Because I’d very much like to be kissed.”

  Chris’s eyes sparked emerald green, but he didn’t immediately move to take advantage of her willingness. Tracing the curve of her right cheek with the tip of the index finger of his left hand, he asked, “Are you sure?”

  “Positive.” Lucy stroked up the front of his shirt, relishing the ripple and release of the firmly muscled flesh beneath the rumpled white fabric. “It’s like lovers and eating garlic. As long as both parties do it, there’s no problem.”
/>
  “Oh, really?”

  “Oh, yes.” She slid her hands over his shoulders and around his neck “Really. It’s one of those things anyone who’s ever worked in an Italian restaurant knows.”

  They kissed. Tentatively at first, then with increasing conviction. Lucy shivered as Chris nipped at her lower lip with the edge of his teeth. A moment later, she felt the sinuous lick of his tongue and whimpered softly.

  She opened to him, her fingers spasming against his nape. This time, he was swift to accept what she was offering.

  The kiss deepened.

  “Lucy...”

  “Chris...”

  He caressed down her back, his hands coming to rest at the base of her spine. He coaxed her closer. She arched into the embrace, headily aware of the hard rise of his masculinity against her upper leg.

  Yes, Lucy thought, angling her head to allow Chris even more intimate access. Oh...yes...

  The threat of hypoxia finally forced them to ease apart a couple of inches. A shared awareness that they were very vulnerable to interruption kept them from renewing the kiss and allowing it to escalate to its natural conclusion.

  “I don’t suppose there’s any way we could lock that from the inside,” Chris said, nodding his head toward the storage room door. His voice was gritty with the effort he was expending to restrain himself.

  Lucy drew an unsteady breath. “No,” she replied, shaking her head. “Sorry.”

  “Damn.”

  “I’ll second that.”

  Her hazel-eyed companion studied her wordlessly for several seconds, then glanced away, his expression turning speculative. When he returned his gaze to her, she caught a glimpse of something that sent her pulse skyrocketing. Her heart skipped a beat. Or two. Or three.

  She spoke Chris’s name on a questioning inflection, her already agitated senses buzzing with possibilities.

  He smiled slowly, the curve of his lips wicked. “Kneel up for me, sweetheart.”

  “But—”

  “There’s no reason for both of us to be frustrated.” His hands settled on her hips as he spoke, compelling her to do as he’d instructed.