Once Around

by Barbara Bretton

  "You're a lot tougher than you look," Jessy said after a moment.

  "I'd better be." Her expression softened just the slightest bit. "So tell me what you want to tell me, or let's change the subject."

  Molly had her dead to rights. She'd dropped two enormous tidbits of information already. She'd look like a fool if she didn't tell the rest of the story. "I think you've figured it out already," she said, careful to keep emotion from her voice. "I made a mistake, got pregnant, and gave the baby up for adoption." She didn't flinch when she said the words. Some things really did get easier with time.

  "How long ago?" Molly asked.

  "Twelve years," she said casually, as if she didn't know the answer to the minute, day, and hour. "I wasn't supposed to hold her, but the nurse-midwife made a mistake and gave her to me."

  They fell silent. What was there to say anyway? Those three minutes with her baby cradled in her arms had defined her life. Nothing that had happened before or since could compete with it. "I don't think about her very often," she said, looking to fill the silence. "I know she has a good life. I know that."

  "I'm sure she has," Molly said. "It took a lot of courage to give your baby a better life."

  "I gave myself a better life." The last of her ugly secrets rolled across the table and fell into Molly's lap. "I was about to start college, premed. A baby would have slowed me down." Think of your future, Jessy darlin', her mama had said to her. There's time enough for you to have a family.

  "You were a baby yourself," Molly said. There was nothing patronizing about her tone, nothing insincere. She almost wished there was. "How would you have supported a child?"

  "Other women manage."

  "You wouldn't have been able to manage med school."

  "I know," she said. Her mama's dreams would have come crashing down around her own seventeen-year-old shoulders. "Sorry for droppin' this on you. I don't know why I did it."

  "Maybe you needed to talk to someone."

  She shrugged. "I don't usually talk to strangers," Molly looked away, and Jessy felt immediately contrite.

  "I didn't mean that the way it sounded," she said. "I'm just not much of a talker."

  "Don't worry," said Molly. "It takes more than that to hurt my feelings."

  But she was lying. Jessy could see it in her eyes, and she felt terrible. All she'd meant— oh, hell. She didn't have any idea what she'd meant: Seeing Spencer had completely unhinged her defenses, loosened her tongue, turned her into a bundle of unruly emotion.

  She poked her fork into the tuna salad. She'd heard about awkward silences, but this had to be the world's longest and most awkward. It sat on the table between them like an overwrought centerpiece of gladioli and lilies that you had to stand up to see over. She'd talked to Molly Chamberlain as though she were a friend or something, as if they'd grown up together or been college roommates. She'd talked to Molly the way she'd never talked to anyone in her life.

  Well, there was no hope for it. She'd be looking for a new place to live tomorrow.

  #

  You'd make one swell therapist, Molly thought as she choked down her tuna salad. The woman opens up to you, and now she looks like she wants to bungee jump without a cord. The last time she'd seen someone that unhappy had been in the IRS waiting room when she and Robert were being audited.

  If somebody didn't break the silence soon, they could apply for membership in a monastery.

  "Ten days until the dinner-dance," she said, adding a tad more sugar to her iced tea. "Have you decided what to wear?"

  The stricken look on Jessy's face grew more tortured. "Oh, come on," Molly said, starting to smile. "We're talking clothes, not nuclear disarmament."

  "I'd rather talk nuclear disarmament."

  "Uh-oh," said Molly. "Nothing to wear?"

  "Not unless sequined scrubs are the going thing."

  Molly wrinkled her nose. "I think you can do better than that."

  "Maybe you can do better than that," Jessy said.. "For me that's high style."

  "You must have something," Molly persisted. "Doctors must go to a lot of cocktail parties."

  "Lowly interns don't go anywhere," Jessy said, "and so far neither do residents."

  "Well, we have ten days to find you something."

  "I'm also broke."

  "These days I specialize in broke." She motioned toward Jessy. "Stand up.. Let me get a good look at you."

  Jessy hesitated, then pushed back her chair and did as Molly ordered. "Not much to work with."

  "You're tiny," Molly said. "What—maybe a size two on a good day?"

  Jessy. nodded. "When I dress. up, I look like a little girl in her mama's clothes."

  "I have a slew of things in my closet but I don't think we could make them down for you." She was almost a foot taller than Jessy and three cup sizes bigger. Alterations on that scale would ruin the line of the garments. "There's a designer consignment shop in Rocky Hilt," she said. "That's a possibility."

  "Rocky Hill?"

  "One town north of here, right on Route 206. I'd be glad to show you."

  Jessy's spine stiffened. visibly. "I don't want to put you out."

  "You're not putting me out. It's my idea, remember?"

  "We'd better be careful," Jessy said. "We might become friends."

  "Anything's possible," Molly said, but she didn't really believe it.

  #

  "Spencer." The woman's voice held the sharp edge of annoyance. "You haven't heard a word I've said."

  Spencer opened his eyes. He was still in that drowsy, post-coital state that rendered him monosyllabic. "I heard you, Court."

  Courtney Wainwright, of the Boston Wainwrights, propped herself up on her left elbow and considered him. Except for the fact that she was naked, you'd never have known she'd spent the last hour making love with him in various exotic positions. She looked as sleek and composed in his bed as she did in the courtroom. He wasn't sure how he felt about that He wasn't sure if he felt anything at all.

  "I can have the cottage the weekend after next. So, if you're available ..." She trailed one perfectly manicured fingertip through his chest hair. He resisted the urge to capture her hand and put it back on her side of the bed. Not a good sign.

  "Can't make it," he said, aiming for the right level of sincerity. "I'm really sorry."

  "I thought we'd blocked out the weekend of the seventeenth quite .a while ago," Courtney said, her tone losing some: of its practiced appeal. "I'm very disappointed."

  Jesus, he thought. Let's not go there.

  "I'm disappointed, too," he said, "but I have something else on the calendar."

  "You could change your calendar."

  "Afraid not."

  She gathered the top sheet around her breasts and rolled away from him. "Not exactly the attitude I was hoping for, Spencer."

  "Not exactly the understanding I was expecting from you, Court."

  "Who is she?" Courtney's voice was flat. You wouldn't catch her emotions bubbling to the surface.

  She'd whipped them into submission a long time ago. He used to think that was one of the things he liked about her. "You're not as practiced a liar as you might think."

  He started to protest, to tell her that there wasn't anyone else, at least not at the moment, when he realized this was the opportunity he'd been waiting for. "I didn't mean to hurt you." He liked to think of himself as a good guy. He never fooled a woman into believing there could be a future with him. He usually looked for women who were unavailable in some very basic way.

  "Don't worry about that," Courtney said, reaching for a cigarette on the nightstand. "I never let you close enough to hurt me."

  She was right. He did the same thing. It wasn't that hard to hide behind a facade of charm. He'd been doing it now for thirty-five years, and it suited him down to the ground.

  "So who is she?" Courtney went on between drags.

  "What makes you think there's someone else?"

  "Experience, darling. Nob
ody says good-bye unless there's someone waiting in the wings."

  "Nothing serious," he said, thinking of Molly Chamberlain. "The lady isn't free yet."

  Courtney leaned back against the headboard and laughed softly. "Then that should make her just about perfect for you."

  You would think so. Molly understood his world. She'd lived in it. She knew what was expected. She was beautiful, warm, and sexy. Not even her pregnancy changed the effect she had on his libido. No normal man could look at her and not want to take her to bed. She seemed to enjoy his company, too. Their lunches always ran overtime, and she prolonged their good-byes with questions he'd answered hours before. Not that he minded. She was easy to be with, undemanding.

  There was just one problem.

  The lady didn't want him.

  #

  Heavy autumn rains swept in the next day. Rafe called Molly and told her he'd be working another job until the weather shifted again. She sounded vaguely annoyed but not terribly disappointed: He would have liked it better the other way around.

  The job was a simple enough one. He was part of a kitchen renovation crew, replacing cabinets and counters, installing a new double sink and dishwasher. There were four of them on the crew, and with luck they could finish up within the week. At first he'd resented the rain for keeping him away from Molly, but as the days passed, he began to think maybe it wasn't such a bad thing.

  Maybe the rain would act like a cold shower.

  Nothing else had worked. Not exhaustion, sublimation, aversion therapy. He'd tried everything he could think of to banish Molly Chamberlain from his mind but he'd failed every single time. if he hadn't known better, he'd have thought he was in love with her. That was ridiculous, of course. Not even he was that big a fool. If he was going to fall in love with a woman, he'd make sure that: this time around he fell in love with one who liked him. She didn't have to like him a lot—he wasn't demanding—but it would be nice if she could manage to stay in the same room with him for more than three minutes without running away.

  Molly couldn't seem to manage that. They'd barely exchanged more than a handful of sentences since the day she gave him the extra ticket to the charity dinner. He could still see the regret in her eyes when he stuck it in the pocket of his work shirt.

  He was glad he wouldn't be around to see the relief in her eyes when he didn't show up.

  Chapter Nine

  On Thursday morning, two days before the dinner-dance, the rains finally stopped. Molly was finishing her first cup of decaf tea when the telephone rang.

  "It stopped raining," Jessy said in her deceptively soft Southern drawl.

  "About time," Molly said, popping two slices of whole wheat into the toaster. "I was about to ask Rafe to build us an ark."

  "I have a few hours free this afternoon," Jessy said, sailing right over Molly's joking remark. "I thought maybe we could visit that store you told me about, the one with the used clothes?"

  Molly leaned back in her chair and suppressed the urge to stare at the telephone in amazement. "I didn't think you were interested," she said. "When you didn't follow up on it, I just assumed—"

  "I've been real busy," Jessy said. Her tone was both apologetic and defensive. "If you can't, I'll—"

  "No." Molly pushed aside the stack of papers next to her teacup. "I'd love to show you the consignment shop. How about I pick you up in front of the hospital around twelve?"

  She'd been working nonstop, it seemed, for weeks now. The assignments were coming steadily, and the way to keep them coming in was by being reliable and accurate. She read thrillers, romances, Westerns, mysteries, and literary novels and offered up her opinions for pay. She'd also done a fair bit of copyediting and a few back-cover blurbs for some series mysteries her publisher put out. Her work engaged her mind but didn't engage her heart, which was exactly the way she liked it. Right now her heart belonged to her baby.

  When she and Jessy had that surprising conversation about the baby Jessy gave up for adoption years ago, Molly had wondered if that would open the floodgates for more talks like that. She was hungry to share confidences about her pregnancy, the kinds of things she would have shared with Robert if he had only stayed around.

  Who was she kidding? It wouldn't have mattered if Robert had stayed around. The baby was of no interest to him and .never had been. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn't imagine him placing his lips against her swollen belly or laughing as the baby kicked against him when they made love. Maybe no man would. Maybe that was just a common female fantasy, right up there with Prince Charming and the knight on the white charger. Maybe pregnant women all over the world fell asleep to fantasies of men who wanted them more as the months passed.

  She finished breakfast then went upstairs to shower and dress. She stripped off her nightgown and tossed it in the hamper, then caught a glimpse of herself in the enormous mirror over the vanity. Her hair was pinned loosely on top of her head. Stray tendrils curled down around her face and shoulders. But it wasn't her hair that surprised her: it was the way her body looked. Her breasts were high and round and very full. Her nipples had darkened to deep rose, a stark contrast to her pale skin. She still had a waist, not as narrow as it had been a few months ago, but it was still there. Her hips seemed rounder, more womanly, a more secure cradle for her blossoming belly. And there was no doubt her belly was blossoming. She could see the faintest network of veins beneath her taut skin and traced one with the tip of her finger.

  The touch sent shock waves through her body. She drew her finger across her belly once again, aware of a tightening sensation deep inside that had nothing to do with the baby sleeping peacefully within her womb. She placed her hand fiat against the swell, letting her palm absorb the softness of her skin and the heat, and her eyes widened as she watched herself in the mirror. She trailed her fingers lower until they slipped into the cushion of auburn curls between her legs.

  She'd never touched herself like this before. Not deliberately. Three times in the last few weeks she'd awakened from a dream to find her hand trailing between her legs, her fingers damp and sticky. Her pubic hair was soft as coiled silk. She'd read that once in a manuscript. A man had likened his lover's mons to a fragrant pillow beneath his cheek. Ridiculous, she'd thought at the time. The image was too poetic to be believed.

  She cupped herself gently. She felt warm and lush to the touch, dampening against her fingertips as she stroked lightly along the swollen lips. She lingered there, plying the supple flesh, discovering what felt good and what felt even better. Robert hadn't believed in foreplay. He'd rushed to the main event as if he was afraid she'd change her mind. There'd been no soft words whispered in the darkness, no poetry, no hot wet mouth pressed against her—

  Her breath caught as she dipped one finger into her body. A voluptuous shiver rippled outward from her core as she watched her nipples tighten into rosebuds.

  Rafe would do this, she thought as her body molded itself to the shape of her fingers. He would stroke her until she was wet and ready, then he would bury his face against her and drink her juices as if they were champagne. And when she was helpless with pleasure and desire, he would trail his mouth up over the swell of her belly to the valley between her breasts and the column of her throat until he found her mouth with his and she tasted herself, tasted him—

  It came from nowhere. A quicksilver unfurling of sensation that spiraled up from her center then vanished, leaving her flushed and embarrassed and filled with even greater yearning than before. A shimmer of what was possible. A hint of what she'd been missing.

  She'd asked the doctor about these feelings, and he'd handled it with the same practical honesty with which he handled everything else. Her body was performing the function for which it was designed, he told her. She was a woman in the prime of her life, brimming with good health and powerful hormones and basic needs. Her feelings were perfectly natural and to be expected.

  In a more perfect world, the man she loved would be there to sha
re the bounty.

  But it wasn't a perfect world. She was alone, except in her dreams, and the only hand that touched her was her own.

  #

  Jessy grabbed a bagel and cup of coffee from the shop next to the consignment store then went outside to wait for Molly. She leaned against the side of her car and ate slowly, trying to imagine how it would feel to actually belong there. A steady stream of women marched in and out of the store—tall, elegant women who looked as if they stepped down from the cover of Vogue. They drove Saabs and BMWs and an occasional Mercedes, understated cars that didn't shout money,' but whispered it in tones more honeyed than Grandma Wyatt's biscuits.

  She made a point of noticing things like that. Back home you wanted to make sure everyone knew just how much money you had in the bank. Why wear one diamond ring if you had three more at home feeling all lonely and neglected? Rich folk piled on the jewelry and darn near wore their fancy clothes with the price tags still attached. And they'd never drive one of those ugly foreign cars, no since. Not while there were still Caddies in this world.

  It was harder to tell the rich people from the regular folks around here, but she was beginning to catch on, Not that she much cared who was who. As her mama used to say, "It didn't make no never mind" to Jessy if her patients were rolling in money or on Medicaid. What did matter to her was that she looked as if she were part of the former, not the latter.

  She told herself that was the only reason she was there, so she could find herself a few fine outfits to help her blend in with the rest of the Princeton gentry, but it was only part of the truth.

  Twenty minutes went by. She finished her bagel and coffee' and strolled around the parking lot. Maybe Molly had forgotten about her. She was sure she wasn't number one on the woman's To Do list. It wasn't hard to imagine that something better had come along. Like Spencer. Her heart twisted. He was always calling Molly, asking her to lunch or stopping by the house under the pretense of having papers for her to sign. You'd have to be blind not to see that he was interested in her Jessy couldn't even blame him. What man wouldn't be dazzled by Molly Chamberlain? Rafe was. There was no reason why Spencer Mackenzie should be any different.