Emma couldn’t respond, thinking about how close they’d been without knowing. He’d have finished college and started medical school about the same time she was climbing the ranks at the network.
Her job in New York seemed like another world, far away from Cupid. Her other life, a few time zones away. She had to get this settled here, so she could go back to Connecticut without the marriage hanging over her head. She needed to go back to her life on the East Coast, even if this sleepy Texas town were tugging on her sensibilities.
Even if the man in front of her was playing havoc with her emotions.
The truth was she didn’t mind being away from the stress at the network, even if she was addicted to CNN and hearing whatever was happening in the news world. It was nice to take a break from doing the news, if this could be called a break.
She’d fought long and hard to claw her way out of this small town and into an important job in New York. It made no sense to second guess that now, she knew. She needed to be careful not to lose her footing in the morass of emotion Tucker still raised in her. Everything would be simpler—and less embarrassing—if he’d just agree to a quiet divorce. They could both move on and she wouldn’t have to admit to anyone that a sophisticated television reporter like herself hadn’t actually made sure the divorce went through.
No murkiness with the note on the new house, no lingering ties to a man from her past.
Nodding at the small flat television at the end of the counter, she asked, “Do you mind turning that on for a few minutes? One of my stories is supposed to be on the noon news.”
“Not at all.” He picked up a small remote and turned on the television before handing it to her. “I think it’s already on your channel.”
Taking it from him, she steeled herself not to react to the warmth of his fingers, brushing against hers.
Turning up the sound on the set, they sat watching for a few minutes, until her story aired. Emma tried not to analyze her word choice or critique her hair, listening instead to the quality of the reporting and the delivery.
“Good job. Very concisely summed up…and you looked good, too.” He sounded sincere.
“Thanks. I have to admit I never expected compliments from you. At least, not now.” She clicked the television off. She never failed to see something she could have done better or said differently in her work, but this story had played without obvious flaws.
“Nonsense. I’m not your enemy. Where did you end up going to school anyway?” Tucker brought his own sandwich over and sat next to her. He seemed to think her being on television was just another job and, strangely, she found this more comfortable than his making a big deal of it. After all, she’d been a journalist quite a while now. Being on television wasn’t a novelty to her anymore.
“I went to Columbia University. Television journalism. In my last year, I got an internship that turned into a grunt job at the network. But it was my foot in the door.”
“And you just kept going?”
She grinned as she studied where to take her next bite of panini. “Yep. Just kept going. What about you? When did medicine seem like the right path?”
Tucker observed that Emma looked relaxed, sitting there in his kitchen. His wife. He still couldn’t think of her any differently, even though they’d spent more time apart than together. She certainly looked more relaxed now than when she’d walked into the church last night.
Tucker munched a chip, studying her. The expertly highlighted hair curled around her head in a sleek cut. He supposed it was understandable that she’d looked a little tense when they met after so many years.
“I started thinking about medicine in my sophomore year of college, I guess. Didn’t tell anyone what I was thinking until a year or so later.” He grinned at her. “Getting into medical school takes both grades and a good score on the MCAT. It took me a while to decide if I wanted to quit partying to focus on all that.”
“But you did.”
“Yes. After that it was straight forward. Biology degree. Medical school. Residency.”
He had to admit to himself that he liked her interest. That perhaps all through school in these past years, he’d even had a little urge to make her regret leaving him.
“Your parents must be proud.” She smiled at him.
“I think so. What about yours?” Trying to ignore the pull of her smile, he took another bite of his sandwich. Falling back in love with her now wouldn’t do him any good.
Emma was good at walking away.
He couldn’t even say he’d really gotten over her after she’d left. Tucker had gone on, but sitting here with her now, just confirmed for him that he’d always felt a tie between them.
She shrugged. “Oh, yes. Big network job, tiny New York apartment. Lots of travel. Even if the pay is only so-so, it sounds glamorous.”
“But there are other rewards, right?”
She looked down at her plate, stirring her chips with a finger. “Yes. I get to talk to fascinating people and go to the hot spots.”
“Some of that has to be pretty scary,” he observed. “Sometimes bad things happen to news people. Like that 60 Minutes reporter who was attacked in a crowd.”
She nodded, looking serious. “Yes, it’s scary sometimes.”
Tucker knew he had to ask. “So is there someone special you’ve come home to? You said you weren’t dating anyone now.”
Meeting his gaze, Emma shook her head. “That’s one of the trade-offs. It’s very hard to maintain relationships in this job. Plenty of random sex available, if you’re into that sort of thing.”
She shrugged. “I’m just not, so it gets kind of lonely. Television journalism is a rough life in general. You give everything to it and sometimes at the end of the day, it’s hard to say why.”
Tucker knew all about the kind of loneliness he saw on her face, but it didn’t make any sense to reproach her now for having left him. It must have been hard for her, too.
“So, about this divorce,” she started.
“We were just kids when we married.” His words were more abrupt than he’d meant them to be.
“I know,” she said after a few minutes. “Making a marriage takes work and emotional maturity. We just weren’t ready.”
Tucker rubbed his hand over his face. “I wasn’t…mature or easy to get along with. I pushed you away.”
Sitting next to him at the bar, Emma stared at her half-eaten sandwich. “Neither of us had a clue. Just a lot of…chemistry.”
“Really hot sex,” he concluded. “But you’re right. We neither one had enough maturity then.”
After a pause, Emma swallowed and said, “The sex was really hot, though.”
“Yes.” He sometimes still had steamy dreams about them together.
She looked up from her plate then. “So what do you want now? The really hard work in your career is behind you. What now? I—I half-expected you to be married to a skinny blonde with three kids.”
Wondering how she felt about that possibility, Tucker laughed, shaking his head. “No. No blonde. No kids.”
He wanted to tell her that every time he’d thought about starting something serious with someone else, he’d remembered her lips and her sweet love. He didn’t say anything, though, not wanting to scare her or to put himself out there yet.
“About the divorce…?”
“What do you want? What’s next for you?” He wanted to ask if she’d missed him, if she ever thought about what might have been—regretted walking away--but he didn’t. “More travel? More stories, I guess.”
She didn’t say anything about his non-answer, going back to her sandwich. Finally, she looked up. “I want to write a book. Several, actually. About the situation in Europe and how the financial policies have impacted every day people.”
He returned her gaze, knowing he was just avoiding the “d” word. “That sounds interesting. Could you do that and maintain the reporting you’ve been doing?”
Shrugging, Emma crun
ched down on a chip and chewed before she responded. “This may sound…strange after making my career my total focus, but I’ve thought about taking a hiatus. Taking some time off from the hectic television news schedule.”
“Time away from the camera?”
She looked down. “Something like that. I’m a little tired of airports and my new boss is—is treating me a little like a lackey. Like a chess piece to be moved wherever he wants. I guess that’s just part of the job, but it gets old.”
“I can imagine.” He looked at her soft mouth and the line of her cheek and he acknowledged to himself what had been true all these years—he didn’t want a divorce. Didn’t want a mythical blonde to mother his three kids. “You want to stay in one place for awhile and write a book? That sounds interesting.”
“Yes.” Emma paused and then burst out, “Tucker, what are we going to do about this marriage? We need to talk about that, not me writing a book.”
He lifted his brows. “We could do both.”
“So let’s talk about the divorce.” She said it in a rush.
Tucker reached out, putting his hand over her wrist. “Is that what you want? To scrub ‘us’ out of your mind and move on?”
She looked at his hand on her arm and then swung her gaze up to meet his eyes. “What are you suggesting? What did you mean this morning when we were at your office and you said you weren’t ‘ready’ for a divorce?”
Instead of answering, Tucker stood, pulling her off her stool and into his arms. Without waiting, he lowered his mouth to hers and instantly felt the familiar hitch in his groin. She felt sweetly familiar in his arms, so perfect. Rounded, but more muscled. More woman than girl. He heard her draw in a swift breath, her fingers clutching at the sleeves of his shirt and his mouth lowered to moved lazily over hers.
He registered the jut of her breasts against his chest as his tongue slid into her mouth and his hand slid down to cup her sweet butt. She fit just right against him, her pelvis against his erection. Her slim shoulders nestled in his embrace.
Slowly the roar in his ears faded some and he eased away from her, let his mouth lift from hers. This could end in so many bad ways. She could break his heart again. She could walk away like she had before.
Emma leaned her head against his chest, still in his arms. “Wow. That hasn’t changed.”
She looked up at him, repeating, “That hasn’t changed. Oh my God. Tucker?”
*
The phone rang and rang with no answer. Emma hung up, not bothering to leave a message. She knew that Allison would call back as soon as she saw the missed call on her phone.
Emma needed to clear her head and talking to Michelle about all this just hours before the ceremony wouldn’t be in her friend’s best interests. So, Allison was her next thought.
Yes, what Emma had told Tucker about wanting to take some time to write a book was true. True, too, that she was tired of traveling to the ends of the earth at a moment’s notice. She also didn’t much like the new head of her department. She missed this small town where she’d grown up and she’d lately been wondering about her former friends’ lives. Facebook only did so much.
But all of that didn’t necessarily mean she wanted to move back to Cupid.
Did it?
She’d been in such a hurry to leave this town and her abortive, broken marital dreams that she couldn’t run fast enough.
Brriinngg. Her cell phone emitted a ring like a phone from the forties. Picking up her phone, she slid her finger across the bottom of the screen. “Hello?”
“Hey, sister.” Allison’s voice came through the speaker. “How are things in the back of beyond?”
Emma sighed. “Confused.”
“Not as easy as you thought, huh?” Her friend laughed kindly. “Going home never is, when you get to be an adult. Your friend losing her mind, what with trying to have the perfect wedding?”
“No.” Emma responded baldly. “It’s not her, it’s me.”
“What do you mean?”
“I think I’m losing my mind.” Slumping down on her motel room bed, Emma confessed, “I never told you, but…I’m married.”
“What? To who?”
“A boy I went to school with. Tucker. Tucker Anderson, M.D. now. I thought I was divorced and it happened so long ago, I just never mention it to anyone. I—I guess it’s too hard to talk about Tucker. I thought the legal stuff was over, that he’d gotten a divorce when I left for college…. But it turns out, I’m still married.”
“Wow. You’re married to a doctor? And you didn’t think to mention this?” Allison’s rich laughter rang out again. “And he’s there in Cupid?”
“Yes, he’s here. I didn’t know he’d gone to medical school, but I knew he’d be here—“
“That’s why you weren’t excited about going back.” Allison had encouraged her to come home, saying she loved to revisit the haunts of her youth.
“Yes. I knew I’d see Tucker.” Emma leaned back on the bed, resting her head against the headboard. “I haven’t seen him since we split up, back when I was still a teenager. Before I even went to college.”
“What were your parents thinking, letting you get married so young?”
“I was eighteen,” Emma said sadly, “and very determined. I…I loved Tucker, before we started arguing all the time and we struggled to pay the rent. That was one good thing our parents did. If we were going to act like adults, they said we needed to act like adults and pay our own bills.”
“This was before college? Not so easy to pay your own way when you only have a high school education.”
“Very true.” Emma lie curled on her bed, the phone to her ear. “I’m…I’m just confused now. I had lunch with Tucker at his house this afternoon and—“
“—And?”
“And we kissed and, oh, Allison, it was really good. It felt like no time had passed. If anything, it was better. He says he doesn’t want a divorce.”
“What? He wants to make it work now? For you to live together and have babies? What?”
Emma rolled over on her back. “I’m not sure, but I think he wants all that.”
“You better make sure what you want. Before you quit your job and move across the country, girl. You need to be really, really sure what you’re looking for. Didn’t you say you left? You left him. It’d be good for you to think about it long and hard before you throw away your career and jump into being Mrs. Doctor.”
*
“Thanks for taking me to the airport.” Emma didn’t look at Tucker, pulling the strap of her carry-on bag up on her shoulder as they stood just inside the tiny airport terminal.
Tucker felt like his chest was caving in again. He didn’t know if there had been any real chance of her giving their marriage another go, but whatever she’d felt when she kissed him back so fervently yesterday, it hadn’t been enough to keep her from leaving for good.
She was leaving again.
Going back to a life without him. All she’d said when she phoned earlier that morning was that they each had lives they’d worked for and that she needed to return to hers.
Tucker recognized now that he still loved her. Through the whole wedding uproar last night, he’d kept grinning at her, unable to keep from sharing the insanity of it all with the one person he felt closest to. The woman he loved. Then when the circus wound down, she’d told him goodnight and walked away.
That had kind of been the theme for them—Emma walking away.
He’d hadn’t planned at all on the evening ending that way. Tucker had hoped last night that she just needed to think it out, but then she’d called this morning, asking him to take her to the little puddle-jumper plane for her flight back.
“Are you sure?” The question popped out before he knew it.
She looked up at him then. “Yes. It’s—it’s best this way. You need to find your blonde and have those three kids.”
Nothing sounded less appealing to him. Tucker almost wished she hadn’t needed hi
m to bring her this morning. Seeing her again wasn’t making it any easier. Emma’s parents had moved away from Cupid years ago and after the debacle of a non-marriage last night, Michelle wasn’t exactly available. Like the smart woman she was, she’d baled out on marrying his messed up step-brother, running for the hills with the man she really loved. Despite her mother’s crying to beat the band.
Tucker’s step-brother’s money had been a big draw there, he knew.
Tucker now looked at Emma, trying not to memorize the curve of her cheek, the feel of her next to him. He didn’t need the sleepless nights, but he knew from previous experience that getting Emma out of his blood would be a struggle.
Again, she was walking away.
She swallowed, looking up to meet his gaze. “We both have lives. Responsibilities.”
He knew she was afraid, but he couldn’t help his fury over her cowardliness. “Yes.”
“I’ve worked really hard for this career. Like you’ve worked for yours.”
He didn’t say anything. What was there really to say?
*
Emma sat strapped into her seat, the small airplane vibrating around her as it prepared to take off. She’d spent last night, staring up at the motel ceiling, thinking about the major step of leaving her job.
But even that didn’t scare her as much as the possibility of trying and failing again with Tucker.
She’d barely crawled out of the ashes last time, spending her entire freshman year of college locked in her dorm room, crying and trying to find the will power to study for her assignments. Knowing she had to leave him, leave the marriage hadn’t made it easier. She hadn’t gone to the freshman mixers or joined in the giddy life of the dorm. Hell, no, she spent her days and nights grieving a tempestuous, dark-eyed boy.
Did she need that again? If she started up the relationship again with Tucker, she had no guarantees. What if they still couldn’t settle their differences? Still couldn’t learn to live together. Lots of couples tried a re-do, but not many managed to make it work the second time.
Finally, in the early morning hours, she’d come to a decision. Emma had known she just needed to walk away from the personal Waterloo that faced her. Tucker had always been the one man who made her the craziest…in every way. And that scared her crazy.
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