Once Around

by Barbara Bretton

  What a joke that was. Her parents had been divorced for years now. Besides, they would push her back to Robert even if he didn't want her. They'd remind her that she probably couldn't do any better, that it was a big cold world out there, and girls without great gifts of beauty and talent should be grateful for whatever they managed to get in this world.

  "He's a lawyer," her mother would say. "He has a future. That's nothing to sneeze at."

  "You've got security," her father would state in his basso profundo voice. "Everything else comes second. Make allowances for him, Molly. He'll come back again." Men made mistakes. Women forgave them. That was the way of the world.

  But this was more than making a mistake. Robert had found true love—whatever that was—and he couldn't wait to leave his wife and unborn child behind in order to claim it. Besides, a man who planned to come back didn't take the mattress and box spring and feather bed and nightstands and lamps and area rugs.

  If she'd needed proof that he didn't love her anymore, she had it in the echoing emptiness of her dream house.

  Maybe it was time she called a lawyer.

  Chapter Three

  Rafe grabbed a Whopper, fries, and a chocolate shake at the Burger King drive-thru on Route 206 then headed for home. The radio was set to an oldies station that broadcast out of Philly. He steered with one hand and managed his supper with the other while Smokey Robinson sang about shopping around.

  Smart guy, that Smokey. Maybe if Molly Chamberlain had shopped around she wouldn't have ended up with a low-life bastard like the man she'd married. The guy was slick, Rafe had to grant him that. "Your references are good," the guy had said over the phone. "I want the best for my wife."

  They met the next day at the diner on Route 1 and agreed on the price. "No contract to sign?" Chamberlain had asked, amusement evident in his well-educated voice.

  "I work on handshakes," Rafe said.

  The bastard laughed. "Then a handshake it is."

  A handshake meant something back where Rafe came from. It was a man's bond. Looked like things were different in Princeton. Chamberlain walked out on the deal the same way he walked out on his wife.

  Nobody was about to nominate Rafe for sainthood, but there was no way in hell he would have walked out on the woman who carried his child. Hell, Karen had to push him out the door when the end finally came down. She'd had to lay out his shortcomings in black and white and blood red before he let her take Sarah and move on to a better life than the one he could provide. A bigger house. A newer car. A fatter bank account. All the things that mattered to her.

  "It's better if you don't see Sarah," Karen had said the day she left him for another, better man. "She's only a baby. Why confuse her? It's not as if she'll remember you."

  The sad thing was that he bought it. He let her walk out the door with his baby daughter. He told himself that the kid didn't need any complications, that old Jeff or George or whatever the hell his name was would be ten times the father he could ever be.

  He even believed it for a while. By the time he got smart and started looking for his daughter, it was too late. Sarah had disappeared behind Karen's chain of marriages and name changes, and Rafe's limited resources hadn't been able to keep pace.

  Karen wanted more than the endless Montana winters they'd both grown up with. She wanted more than life on, a failing piece of land in the middle of nowhere. She said she wanted, more for their daughter. Montana winters were as harsh and unforgiving as the land. Karen was a young, vibrant woman who yearned for bright lights and excitement and fun. And he let her go.

  So what makes you better than that Chamberlain bastard?

  That was an easy one.

  Nothing.

  Chamberlain walked out on his wife and kid. Rafe had let himself be pushed out. And maybe, if he was being honest with himself, there was a part of him that had been glad to go. He was tired of the fighting, tired of sleeping on the couch every, night because his wife didn't want him in her bed. She curled herself around the baby and shut him out as if he'd never existed. After a while, he wasn't sure he did.

  He didn't miss Karen. He missed the idea of her. He missed knowing there was someone who gave a damn if he lived or died. Not that Karen had ever cared, but he'd been able to convince himself that she did, and for a while that was enough.

  Hard to do that when you came home every night to an empty house.

  Two empty houses if you counted Miriam's.

  He polished off the last of the fries as he hung a right onto the dirt road that led to the main house. Miriam was down in Florida, where she spent most of her year. The main house was closed and empty except for the front rooms and the kitchen. Ginny, the housekeeper, came in three mornings a week, but the place still looked more like an abandoned warehouse than a home. Miriam was the one who brought it to life.

  He went in through the back door and whistled for Jinx. A second later he heard the faint tinkling of a bell, then, a few more seconds later, the huge black-and-white cat was rubbing herself against his ankles. Miriam used to take the cat down to Florida with her, but now that Jinx was old and infirm, the vet suggested she'd be better off where she was.

  "I should find her another home," Miriam had fretted before she left for Florida a few weeks ago. "You do enough for me, Rafael. I'm not about to turn you into a pet-sitter."

  Rafe had mumbled something about letting the old cat live out her days where she was most comfortable, which had led to a sharp laugh from Miriam, who was pushing ninety and not about to do any such thing herself.

  He checked the front rooms, listened for strange noises, then headed up the sloping backyard toward his house. Jinx shadowed every step he made. He had a few scars from a tangle with Jinx back in the old days, but they'd reached an accommodation that suited them both. Neither one of them liked being alone.

  The old carriage house was set deep in the woods, and if you looked hard from the back door you could catch a glimpse of the Delaware River. The garage, a more recent addition, faced the main building. These days it was filled with furniture Miriam no longer wanted or needed. He'd been working on replacing bad siding on his house and the garage for six months now and, from the looks of things, he had another six months' work ahead of him. Six months . .. six years. It didn't much matter. One thing he had was time.

  You'd think he'd be used to being alone after all these years, but, he wasn't. There was, still that moment after he opened the front door when he thought he heard the sound of music floating out from the kitchen, when he actually believed there was somebody waiting for him. Somebody like Molly Chamberlain, maybe, with that cascade of autumn hair and huge blue eyes and lush body pressed against his chest—

  "Get over it," he muttered as he opened a can of cat food. Jinx meowed and wrapped herself about his ankles. When was the last time a woman did that? He crouched down and placed the dish in front of the old cat. Jinx was all over it before he stood back up.

  #

  Molly wasn't hungry, but she forced herself to make a scrambled egg. She carried her bright yellow sandwich plate and glass of milk upstairs to the den—the only room with furniture in it. She sat on the edge of the bed and looked out the window at the darkening sky as she pushed the lumps of egg around with her fork.

  She had an appointment tomorrow with a lawyer who came highly recommended by three of her newly divorced acquaintances. Spencer Mackenzie had a fairly impressive list of clients and was generally considered to be a fair, kindhearted, honest man—all the things Molly had once believed her own husband to be.

  She put the plate down on the nightstand. Her stomach was tied up in knots. She had a lump in her throat the size of a softball. The only thing she could manage to get down was a sip of milk.

  Think of the baby, that voice inside her head warned. The baby is what really matters.

  She forced herself to drink some more milk then shuddered as it slid down her aching throat. A person really could cry herself sick. She'd proved that
after Rafe Garrick left and she faced what had happened to her. She'd gone out for the afternoon to see her doctor, and by the time she got home, her whole life had been turned upside-down and inside-out. She'd managed to pull herself together when she called Mackenzie's office, but the second she hung up the phone, the tears started again.

  While she was making supper, Gail from across the street called her to try to apologize, but Molly wasn't in the mood to play the neighbor game. She stood by the answering machine in the kitchen and listened to Gail mouth meaningless platitudes, and she could barely hold back from smashing the machine with the bottom of her frying pan.

  She was so filled with emotion she found it hard to breathe. Anger. Pain. Bitter disappointment. She wanted to hit something or somebody. Just ball up her fist and ram it into Robert's face. She wanted to wipe that phony smile off his face permanently. Knock out a few of those even white teeth. Maybe make him feel one one-hundredth of the pain she was feeling right this minute thanks to him.

  The first stars appeared beyond her window, faint suggestions of light in the milky night sky. The Perseid meteor showers had been a disappointment this year. She'd sat out on her front step for hours, just looking up at the sky and waiting, but alt she saw was a few faint streaks of moving light.

  The baby moved restlessly inside her. She leaned back against the pillows and moved her hand over her belly in gentle circles. Funny how soothing touch could be: You wouldn't think the touch of your own hand against your own skin could be comforting, but it was. She'd always imagined it would be Robert's fingers splayed across her swelling belly, his mouth pressed against the taut skin, Rafe Garrick's mouth and tongue finding her center, teasing her until—

  Heat blossomed deep inside her chest. Her face burned with it. Robert's tongue never went anywhere it didn't have to go, and she'd never felt the loss. She'd never imagined it sliding up the inside of her thigh or exploring higher. Not in all the years they were together. Not once. Sex had never been the centerpiece of their marriage. Friendship was. Companionship. The joy that came from working together as partners with a common goal.

  She sat up and reached for the cool glass of milk and pressed it against her forehead. She was surprised it didn't sizzle when it touched her heated skin. The searing image of Garrick's dark head buried between her thighs was almost enough to bring her to a climax, which was laughable since she couldn't remember her last climax. They'd been as infrequent in her life as four-leaf clovers and rainbows. She'd heard that something amazing happened to women in the second trimester. It had to do with increased blood flow and greater energy, and it made sex juicy and even more wonderful than before.

  Which was terrific if you had somebody to share all of that wonder and juiciness with and you were the kind of woman who'd know what to do with it in the first place.

  There was an enormous difference between being a sexy-looking woman and being a sexual one. She'd be a fool if she didn't realize she had the former down cold; it was the latter that had always eluded her. Some women sizzled naturally. Some simmered. Some could barely manage the occasional flickering flame. That was Molly. She loved being held, she loved pillow talk. If sex was how you got there, then she was all for it. Otherwise, she could live without it. And so could Robert. At least, the Robert who'd lived with her.

  Who could say? Maybe he made love morning, noon, and night with Diandra, the love of his life. Maybe she'd awakened something in him that Molly didn't even know existed. Did he kneel between Diandra's legs and stroke her with his tongue? Did he dip into her and taste her the way he'd never tasted Molly?

  It suddenly struck her as a terrible shame that in all the years she'd slept next to Robert, they'd never once shared that deepest intimacy. He'd suggested a variation once with an insistent hand on the back of her head, but she'd refused. The thought did nothing for her, and Robert quickly put aside the notion.

  She'd thought of that when Rafe Garrick swept her up into his arms. Maybe it had been the rugged strength of his body, the way she'd felt cradled and protected, or maybe it was just that she'd needed to feel a man's hands on her body—whatever it was the image of her hair drifting across his naked belly had suddenly flashed in front of her in all of its Technicolor glory. She saw her hands sliding up his thighs, felt the dark nest of curls tickling her cheek, the way his erection leaped at the first touch of her tongue.

  And then she had seen the dark flare of something unknowable in his eyes and she pressed her face against his unfamiliar shoulder and prayed he couldn't read minds, because if he could, she'd have to join the witness protection plan. She'd never been able to look him in the eye.

  Assuming she ever saw him again—which, all things considered, wasn't very likely at all.

  #

  Spencer Mackenzie was a good lawyer, but he wasn't a great one. At some firms that wouldn't get you an office with a window. At Steinberg, Corelli, and Winterbourne, it got him a partnership before he turned thirty-five.

  He didn't have the sharpest courtroom style. His attention to detail waxed and waned with the seasons. But when it came to generating billable-hours business, Spencer Mackenzie was your guy.

  The one thing he had that the others didn't was connections. Old money, old family connections. His family was old guard New York/Connecticut, the land of Junior League balls, smoky wood-paneled men's clubs, handsome Fifth Avenue apartments that were handed down from generation to generation like the family silver. When you didn't work as hard as the other guy, you had more time to get out and socialize, and socializing was Spencer's strong suit. Growing up in his late brother's shadow, he'd learned to compensate for being second best in grades and potential by being fun to be around. Sometimes that proved to be more than enough. It was working for him at SC&W, and one day it might even work with his family. They might even forgive him for being the son who lived.

  Last summer he'd driven up to Greenwich for a friend's wedding and he'd come away with three new clients. A lot of divorces in Greenwich. Apparently not even those Connecticut mansions could protect their residents from the cold winds of change. But it wasn't the state of marriage in the Nutmeg State that had stayed in his memory. It was Molly Kelly Chamberlain.

  Over the years he'd gotten pretty damn good at picking out the likely candidates for divorce, and the beauteous Mrs. Chamberlain wasn't among them, That fact had depressed him for a good week.

  She actually loved her husband. She'd looked at the guy as if he'd hung the moon. Nobody had ever looked at Spencer that way, and he'd felt a pain in his gut the first time he looked into Molly Chamberlain's big blue eyes and saw her husband's reflection looking back at him. As a rule beautiful women didn't unnerve him. His mother and sisters were renowned for their fine-boned, patrician good looks, that ice-princess Grace Kelly thing that set most men's imaginations into high gear. Most of the women he'd dated were cast from the same mold, and after a while he took beauty as a given. Only the lack of it made him sit up and take notice.

  But there was something different about Molly Chamberlain. He'd zeroed in on it right from the first moment they'd met at Randall and Deni's wedding a few months ago. Instead of slow beat, there was fire. When he asked her to dance and his palm touched the bare skin of her back and found it cool, he'd started in surprise.

  "Is something wrong?" she'd asked. He could still hear her voice, smoky and promising

  "This is a tango," he said. "It's been a hell of a long time since I tangoed."

  "I can't tango either,' she said with a throaty laugh. "We'll fake it."

  She was tall and lithe, and they moved well together. He spun her into a turn, and her cloud of Sweet red-gold hair fanned across his cheek as she moved back into his arms. Except for the wedding ring on her left hand, she was perfect.

  "Mr. Mackenzie." He looked up to see his assistant Annie in the doorway. "Mrs. Chamberlain is here for her one o'clock. Want me to show her in?"

  "Thanks, Annie. I'll do it."

  He grabbed his s
uit jacket from the back of his chair and slipped it on. He hadn't actually seen Molly Kelly Chamberlain since the day of the wedding. When she called yesterday afternoon and said she wanted to meet with him, he'd allowed himself ten seconds to believe it might be personal. Then he got real.

  She was sitting on a plush leather chair in the waiting room, her long showgirl legs crossed, back straight, head held high. She had told him over the phone that she was pregnant, but you wouldn't know that by looking at her. She was all long curves and elegant lines. Despite her sober navy suit, she looked like an exotic flower set down among potted plants. He'd never wanted a woman more or stood less of a chance.

  "Mrs. Chamberlain." He extended his right hand in greeting.

  "Molly," she said, rising gracefully to her feet. She clasped his hand. Again the cool touch of her skin took him by surprise. He had the feeling she was the kind of woman who would always take him by surprise. "Thank you for seeing me on such short notice, Spencer."

  He liked the way his name sounded when she said it. "We'll talk in my office."

  He stepped to the right to let her pass. His hand rested lightly on the small of her back as he escorted her inside. He ignored his assistant Annie's curious glance. He wasn't a toucher. Everyone knew that.

  "Coffee?" he asked as she sank into the deep blue armchair in front of his desk.

  "Water," she said. Her hands rested lightly across her flat belly. "Caffeine's no good for the baby."

  He felt a surge of disappointment at the reminder that she was, in all the ways that mattered, unapproachable. "Water it is," he said, then filled a crystal tumbler with iced water from the pitcher atop the bar. He poured himself one as well.