Good Husband Material

by Susan Mallery

  Kari didn’t know what to say, so she gave in to impulse and moved close for a hug. After Aurora disappeared in a cloud of perfume and a promise to “bring you something wonderful from London,” Kari returned to the kitchen, where she poured out her now cold coffee.

  Just two hours before, her world had been only mildly confusing. Now it was like living inside a tornado where everything was spinning too fast to allow her to hold on.

  She didn’t know what to make of her mother’s story. It shouldn’t change anything but her perception of the past, yet somehow everything looked different. Now she had a more clear understanding of what Gage was going through, albeit on a smaller scale.

  Nothing was ever simple, she thought, moving to the side window and staring at his house. So much had happened in such a short period of time.

  Chapter Twelve

  Kari decided the best antidote for feeling unsettled was hard work. She finished painting the second upstairs bedroom, then started on her grandmother’s room. The old pieces of furniture slid away from the walls more easily than she had anticipated. She pushed everything toward the center of the room to give herself space to work. She took down drapes, picked up throw rugs and draped drop cloths over everything. By two-thirty she was sweaty, exhausted and in need of a break.

  In an effort to get away from her own company, she decided on a trip to the grocery store. As much as she might want to see Gage that night, she figured it was unlikely. So she settled on “chick” food for dinner. A salad, yummy bread, with a pint of her favorite ice cream for dessert.

  She’d just stopped by the tomato display to pick out a couple for her salad when something slammed into her grocery cart. One of the wheels rolled into her foot, making her jump. Kari turned in surprise—then wished she hadn’t.

  Daisy stood behind her own cart, glaring at Kari. “I can’t believe it,” the petite redhead said, her eyes flashing with rage. “I told you about my plans for Gage, but you didn’t care. Well, fine. Try for him if you want, but you’re destined to fail. I might have felt sorry for you before, but now I figure you’ve earned it.”

  Kari had the urge to tilt her head and wiggle her earlobe. She couldn’t have heard any of that correctly.

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she said at last.

  Daisy looked disbelieving. “Sure you don’t. I told you I was interested in Gage, but you didn’t care. You just waltzed into his bed without giving a damn about anyone else. I’ll have you know, Gage doesn’t like his women that easy. But I guess you already knew that.”

  Kari opened her mouth, but before she could speak, Daisy narrowed her gaze.

  “Don’t try to deny it. I saw you leaving his place a couple of mornings ago. I doubt you’d just dropped by to borrow some coffee.”

  The joys of small towns, Kari thought, trying to find the humor in the situation. She shook her head. “First of all, what I do or don’t do with Gage isn’t anyone’s business but ours. Second, I don’t know why you’re so put out. You and I aren’t friends. In fact, we’ve barely met. I don’t owe you anything. If you were in love with him, I might give your feelings some consideration, but you’ve already admitted you’re not. Your interest in Gage comes from the fact that you think he’ll be a good husband and father. While I’m sure he’d appreciate the endorsement, I suspect if he does decide to marry, he’s going to want his future wife to be madly in love with him.”

  Daisy’s eyes flashed with temper. “I suspect what he’ll want is someone who doesn’t take off at the first sign of trouble.”

  Kari acknowledged the direct hit with a slight wince, but didn’t otherwise respond to that comment. “If Gage is interested in you,” she said, instead, “no one else would matter to him, so I wouldn’t be a threat to you. If he’s not interested, then warning me off doesn’t make any difference at all.”

  “You’re judging me.” Daisy was fuming. “But you’re no better. You had him and you let him go. How smart was that?”

  “I was young and foolish,” Kari admitted. “I didn’t realize how wonderful he was, but I do now.”

  “You’re not going to get him back.”

  Kari grabbed a tomato and put it in her cart. “I don’t think you get to decide that,” she said coolly, then pulled her cart from Daisy’s and stalked away.

  As she walked, she kept her head high, but she was shaking inside. The encounter had rattled her more than she wanted to admit.

  As she approached the checkout stand, she thought of half a dozen things she should have said to Daisy, including the fact that at least she’d been smart enough to fall in love with him eight years ago. If Kari thought for a second that she was going to stay around and that he was interested, she would—

  Kari cut that thought off before she could finish it. Being annoyed with Daisy was one thing, but acting foolishly was another. She didn’t love Gage. She refused to believe she was the kind of woman who would still be in love with him after all this time. She wasn’t. She hadn’t secretly been waiting to come back to him. The idea was laughable.

  No. She had left and she had gotten on with her life. She was still getting on with it. Gage was just a memory. The past, not the future.

  Gage pulled into the cemetery and parked by the curb. He waited a long time before getting out of his car. The rational side of him knew that there was no hope of getting answers here. His father had long since moved beyond speaking.

  His father.

  Just thinking the words propelled him from the car. Ralph Reynolds—the name on Gage’s birth certificate. The man who had loved him and raised him and shown him right from wrong. Ralph? No, he thought as he crossed the freshly cut lawn. Not Ralph. Dad.

  Kari was right. Biology be damned. This man he had loved and mourned was his real father. He might not share the blood that ran in Gage’s veins, but he had influenced him and molded him.

  He crossed to the simple marble marker. Ralph Emerson Reynolds. There were the dates of his birth and death, followed by “Beloved husband and father.”

  He had been beloved, Gage reminded himself. Ralph’s unexpected death from a heart attack had devastated the family. Even Quinn had been caught by surprise.

  Gage crouched by the marble marker. “Hey, Dad,” he said, then stopped because talking to himself in the middle of a cemetery felt strange. Then he continued. “Mama told me. About my biological father.” He swallowed. “I wish you’d told me the truth. It wouldn’t have changed anything.”

  He stared at the marble. “Okay. It would have changed things. But hearing it from you would have been better than finding out the way I did. You could have explained things to me. You could have told Quinn why he was never good enough.”

  Gage stood and paced on the grass. Quinn had deserved to know why his best had never mattered. Ralph Reynolds had been a great father to Gage, but he’d been a real bastard to Quinn.

  “You shouldn’t have done it,” Gage said, spinning back to the tombstone. “You should have treated us the same. If you could accept me—someone else’s son—you should have accepted him.”

  He wanted to rage against his father, but it was years too late. Maybe that’s why he hadn’t been told. Maybe Ralph had pretended; maybe he’d forgotten the truth. At least for Gage.

  Damn. There weren’t going to be any sudden illuminations that would set his world to rights.

  His chest tightened, his throat burned. He looked up at the sky, then back at the grave. “I still would have loved you, no matter what. Why didn’t you believe that?”

  There was only silence, punctuated by the background songs of the birds. There were no answers here, there was no peace. His father had long since left for another place. This problem was for the living. Which meant Gage had another stop to make.

  In the way that mothers always seem to know what their sons are up to, Edie stood on the porch, watching for him as he drove up. She didn’t walk down the stairs to greet him or smile. She stayed where she was, waiting
to see his reaction.

  He tried to remember how their last conversation had ended, but it was all a blur. Too much emotion, he thought. Too many revelations.

  “Hey,” he said as he climbed the stairs. He saw the front door was open and that John hovered in the front room.

  “Gage.”

  Edie pressed her hands together. All the energy seemed to have been drained out of her. Her eyes remained dull and flat.

  Without saying anything, he crossed to her and pulled her into his arms. She collapsed against him, a sudden sob catching in her throat.

  “It’s okay, Mama,” he said, as she started to cry. “I was really pissed off, but it’s okay now.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said shakily. “So sorry. I never meant to hurt you. There were so many times I wanted to tell you the truth.”

  “I know.” He stroked her hair. “I believe you. Dad wouldn’t have wanted you to say anything. If he couldn’t fix the problem, he pretended it didn’t exist. Didn’t we used to joke about that?”

  She raised her head and stared at him. Tears dampened her cheeks. “He is your father, Gage. No matter what, that hasn’t changed.”

  “I know. I lost it for a while, but it’s back.”

  John came out and joined him. He put an arm around Edie and held out his hand to Gage. They shook, then John nodded.

  “I told her you’d come around.”

  “Thanks.”

  His mother beamed at him. “Do you want to come in? We could talk. There are still some things—”

  He cut her off with a quick smile. “I need some time, okay?”

  He saw that she didn’t want to put off the rest of whatever it was she had to share, but he didn’t care if he never knew any more.

  “Just a couple of days,” he promised, and turned back to his car.

  She and John stood on the porch, watching him as he pulled out. He waved and his mother smiled at him.

  She thought everything was all right now. That it was all behind them, Gage thought as he headed back to the station. What she’d done…well, she’d had her reasons. Some he agreed with, some he didn’t. It would take a long time for him to get over the fact that his mother had thought she was in love with someone else while she was still married to his father. But what Edie and Ralph Reynolds had done…had survived…wasn’t his business. He had to deal with what had had an impact on him.

  The truth was that forgiving his mother and making peace with his father didn’t change one fact: he was not the man he’d always thought he was.

  Kari washed brushes in the sink in the utility room. It was after nine in the evening, and she focused on the task at hand in an effort to keep her brain from repeating the same thought over and over again.

  It had been nearly a week since she’d seen Gage.

  A week! Six days and twenty-two hours.

  Why? She knew that he’d been avoiding her, but couldn’t quite pin down the reason. She wanted to believe it was all about his past, but she had a bad feeling that some of it was personal. With everything else going on in his life, the last thing he would want to worry about was her virginity, or how he’d made that disappear. No doubt he thought she would already be picking out china patterns, while he’d simply been interested in getting laid.

  Kari turned off the water and sighed. Okay, that was a slight exaggeration. Gage wasn’t the kind of guy to only want sex for sex’s sake. If he was, he would never have been so careful while they were dating. He would have pushed her, and, as much as she’d been in love with him, she would have given in.

  So Gage hadn’t been looking for an easy score and she wasn’t looking to get married to the first man she slept with. Reality lay somewhere in between.

  She set the wet brushes on a rack, then washed her hands and dried them on a towel. Despite the pulsing urge inside her, she was not going to cross to the front window and stare out from an opening in the lace curtains. Spying on Gage, watching for when he got home, was way too pathetic. Besides, she’d been doing it too much lately. If she wanted to talk to him, she should simply call, like a normal person. Or go to his house, or even his office. If she didn’t…

  Kari walked into the kitchen and crossed to the refrigerator. She’d bought a pint of cookie-dough ice cream on her last visit to the grocery, and this seemed like a fine time to have it for dinner. Despite all her logical conversations with herself, the bottom line was that she was alone on a Saturday night, watching for the boy next door to come home and ask her out. This was worse than when she was in high school. She had managed to live in a big city for eight years, have different experiences, even have something close to a successful modeling career. Yet nothing had changed. The situation would be pretty funny if it were happening to someone else.

  The phone rang, causing her to slam the freezer door. Her heart rate increased. There were only two types of calls in her current world—Gage, or not Gage. This increased the pathetic factor, but was completely true.

  “Hello?” she said, trying not to sound breathless.

  “Hi, Kari,” Gage said. “What’s going on?”

  Over the past week, she’d planned her conversation with him dozens of times. She’d had witty lines and blasé lines and casual questions all lined up. Now, of course, she couldn’t think of anything but “Not much. I’ve been working on the house. Just finished painting for the day.”

  “I’ve been meaning to get back there and help you.”

  The road to hell and all that, she thought. “My remodeling job isn’t your responsibility,” she said. “How are you doing?”

  “Okay. Still trying to figure things out.”

  Silence. She sighed. Things had been so much easier before. Before they’d made love. Before he’d found out about his past.

  He cleared his throat. “The reason I phoned is that there’s a big dance up at the country club. I’ve had a few calls from worried parents. They’re concerned that the kids might be renting hotel rooms for the night. I did some checking around and it looks like a group of them are planning to spend the night at the Possum Landing Lodge. I’m on my way over to break things up. I was hoping you’d come with me.”

  She frowned. “To break up a party?”

  “Yeah, well, the odds are that some of these teenagers are going to be going at it in the room, and I don’t want to have to deal with a bunch of half-dressed girls.”

  Not exactly the invitation she’d been waiting for, but it was better than nothing. “Sure, I’ll help.”

  “Great. I’ll be by in about ten minutes.”

  “Okay. ’Bye.”

  She hung up, then flew upstairs to replace her paint-spattered shorts and T-shirt with a crisp summer dress. There wasn’t time for a shower or a fabulous hairstyle, so she ran a brush through her hair, fluffing up the ends while she worked. After racing into the bathroom, she brushed her teeth, applied mascara and lip gloss and slipped on some silver hoops. A pair of sandals completed her outfit. She hurried back downstairs and collected her house key, then walked to the front door. She’d just reached it when Gage knocked.

  She opened the door and tried not to smile at him. Against her will, her mouth curved up and every cell in her body danced. Talk about betrayal.

  Even more frustrating, he looked really, really good. There were shadows under his eyes as if he hadn’t been sleeping much, and his uniform was a little rumpled—but none of that mattered. Not when she could see into his eyes and watch him smile back at her.

  “Hi,” he said. “Thanks for the help.”

  “No problem.”

  He didn’t move back, so she couldn’t step out of the house. They looked at each other. He reached out his hand and lightly touched her cheek.

  “I’ve been avoiding you.”

  The admission surprised her. She decided to offer one of her own. “I noticed.”

  “It wasn’t because of…” He paused. “I’ve had a lot on my mind. I didn’t want to dump it all on you.”

  �
��We’re friends, Gage. I’m happy to listen.”

  “I may take you up on that. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking and I don’t seem to be making any progress.”

  “Have you talked with your mom? Are things okay there?”

  He nodded. “A couple of days ago I went to see her. She’s still trying to tell me more stuff, and I don’t want to hear it. I know that I have to listen eventually. But other than that, we’re fine.”

  She wanted to ask if she and Gage were fine, too. If making love had changed things forever, or if they could go back to their easy, teasing, fun relationship.

  “I’ve missed you,” she said before she could stop herself.

  “I’ve missed you, too. More than I should.”

  Her heart skipped a beat and she felt positively giddy. Man, oh man, she had it bad.

  “You ready?” he asked.

  “Sure.”

  He stepped back, and she moved onto the porch, closing the door behind her. As they walked to the car, Gage rested his hand on the back of her neck. She liked the heat of him and the feel of his body close to hers. Unfortunately, there didn’t seem to be much about Gage she didn’t like.

  They drove in silence to the motel. When they arrived, several parents were already pacing in the parking lot. Gage spoke to them, then went to the main office and collected keys from the night manager.

  “Ready?” he asked Kari, as they walked up the stairs.

  “No, but that’s okay.”

  It was dark and quiet in the corridor. Voices from the parking lot faded as they moved toward the rear of the motel. Up ahead, light spilled out of an open door. The sound of laughter and loud voices drifted toward them.

  “Do you do this sort of thing often?” she asked, trailing behind him.

  “When asked. I prefer to come out at the request of the parents and clear things up before they get out of hand. That way I can get everyone home with a warning. If I get a call from the motel management, then it’s official and I have to get tough. Most of the kids are mortified to be caught by me and their folks. They don’t need much more encouragement to stop.”