She’d been having lunch with the distributor?
“How would I recognize him? I’ve never met the man.” The words came out more defensive than Adam intended, but he felt blindsided. More blindsided than he’d felt watching Jenny having lunch with a stranger. And this was so much worse, because that was the kind of man she deserved. Healthy, financially stable. A man who listened to her ideas. Adam hated him.
“You talked to him on the phone a hundred times. Saw his picture on his website.”
So he had. But that didn’t change the fact that the man on the website hadn’t looked so...tall and fit as the man sitting with his wife in the pizza parlor. Adam opened his mouth to say something, anything, that would make more sense than the rest of this conversation. Words failed him. So he tilted his head and took her mouth with his.
Her lips were warm against his, soft and yielding. He’d expected hard. Wary. The softness spurred him on. He dipped his tongue inside her mouth, tasting her. Flames of attraction replaced the uneasy feeling in his belly. Adam wrapped one arm around her slender waist and cupped her jaw with his opposite hand. She trembled, but made no move to embrace him. She didn’t draw away, though.
Adam pulled her body more firmly against his, catching his fingers in the belt loop of her jeans. A little squeak escaped her throat, then Jenny’s arms were wrapped around his neck, holding his mouth against hers. Her tongue pushed into his mouth, as if she were as hungry for him as he was for her. Her small fingers teased his nape. He wanted more.
Wanted to feel her body under him, not just against him. Wanted to watch her head fall back against the pillows in their big bed. He’d settle for a few more minutes like this, though, in the soft grass with the sun sinking into the lake behind them.
“Jenny,” he said against her mouth, and it was as if his voice broke the spell that had settled over the backyard. Jenny pulled away, putting her hands to her mouth.
“This isn’t a good idea,” she said, backing away from him. “For the record, I’m not having secret lunches with men I’m romantically interested in. I’m not romantically interested in anyone right now, and I’m not sure I want to be anytime soon. You’re moving out. We need to set boundaries or this is going to get messy.”
He didn’t want boundaries, but Jenny was nearly to the sidewalk now. Her heel hit the concrete, but she caught herself midstumble. Adam stepped forward, but she held out her hands as if warding him off.
“I’m fine. I’m fine,” she said, as if reassuring herself with the words. She reached behind her, grasping the doorknob. “I, ah, dinner will be ready at six,” she said, and fled inside the house.
She was gone. Adam swallowed. For now, she was gone, but for a moment, she’d been right here with him.
He just had to keep her with him next time.
CHAPTER SIX
JENNY CLOSED THE door to the bedroom she’d shared with Adam for the past three years, and pressed her back against the cool wood. She put her fingers to her mouth. She could still feel his mouth on hers and, damn it, it shouldn’t have felt so right.
Kissing him was...a mistake. A confusing, annoying, end-of-the-world mistake. One she wished she could repeat again right this second. In her mind, she knew she shouldn’t do it again. Shouldn’t go down those stairs.
God, but she wanted to. To kiss her husband until... Until what? Kissing him wouldn’t change anything. Kissing Adam again would only muddy the waters between them even more. She loved the man, but she couldn’t live with him anymore. Not like this. She couldn’t be the devoted wife—couldn’t be like his mother, who had always fallen in line with what Owen wanted. Or her own mother, who ignored her husband until he did something sweet like send her a bouquet of lilies.
Jenny kicked off her tennis shoes and picked up the bottle of water from her bedside table. Sipped.
She wasn’t being fair, and she knew it. Nancy was a smart, capable woman who happened to like living out of an RV with her husband six months of every year. She liked owning a cabinet shop, and couldn’t understand why her son had wanted to expand the family business, though she had still been supportive of the move. Until the tornado, anyway.
As for Margery Hastings, she was self-centered and spoiled and distant. Jenny didn’t want to be any of those things, either. She wanted... Jenny sighed. She wanted to be like one of those confident, capable, professional women she watched on television. They all had careers and aspirations and went after the things they wanted. She had only ever chased Adam, had never thought about her own career. Maybe she should have listened to her father.
Doug had given his blessing when Adam proposed on Jenny’s graduation night, but he’d suggested—several times—that she go on to college. Had even offered to pay for the courses. She’d thought the idea was silly. All she had wanted was Adam.
She still wanted him, but wanted more, too. Did that make her selfish like her mother? She didn’t want to be selfish.
Jenny tossed her grubby jeans into a corner, and grabbed clean shorts, a T-shirt and underthings from a drawer before turning on the shower in her private bathroom. Considered briefly adding a sweater to the pile of clothes, but another layer wasn’t going to stop her from wanting to kiss her husband. Neither was a hot shower, so she turned the water to cold, then stepped under the chilly spray.
She needed to get her head on straight before she saw Adam at dinner. She had a feeling she was going to need all her wits about her or she’d fall right back into those old habits.
* * *
ADAM WOKE TO a shaft of brilliant September sun, and for the first time in a long time, he wasn’t mad at the sun for putting out the darkness of the night. He still didn’t know what his diagnosis meant for his family, but he knew he wanted to be with them. Maybe that made him selfish.
He stretched his arms over his head and hit the soft headboard in the sleeper compartment of the RV. It was a Wednesday, not exactly the first day of the week, but he figured fresh starts didn’t have to begin on a Monday. Or in January. He would start here, and he would start with breakfast.
His knee protested when he stood, but he made it into the compact shower of the RV without banging either his injured knee or his hip on the wall. Another win. Taking the narrow steps to the driveway was much harder than stepping up into the vehicle last night, but the wheelchair was only a few feet away inside the garage. He punched in the code to open the door and dropped into the chair. He rubbed his shoulders and biceps. Taking that trek around town yesterday wasn’t the smartest move he’d made. What was it the doctor said? Baby steps. Wheeling himself to school with the boys and then all over downtown was more than a baby step.
Pain wasn’t a bad thing, though. He could deal with sore muscles.
In the kitchen he grabbed a pan from the drawer beneath the oven, eggs from the fridge and bread from the basket. Some women liked crêpes or fancy waffles. His Jenny liked scrambled eggs on dry toast. He scrambled the eggs in a bowl while the pan heated, then poured them in to begin cooking, and put bread in the toaster oven.
The boys’ pounding feet sounded on the stairs.
“Dad!” Garrett launched himself at Adam’s wheelchair. He caught the boy and hugged him, taking a long moment to soak in the smell of the baby shampoo Jenny still used on the boys. “You’re up. You gonna walk us to school again? So we don’t have to take the mom bus?”
“It’s the Mustang, dummy, not the bus.” Frankie rolled his eyes at his younger brother, and Garrett narrowed his eyes at the insult.
“Let’s put that word away for a while.” Adam was certain he and Aiden had called one another much worse than dummy, but something about the way Frankie said it made Adam’s skin tighten. “How about scrambled eggs and toast for breakfast?”
“With jelly?” Garrett eyed the plates on the counter.
“Jelly on scrambled eggs
? Where else would it go?” Adam teased. He put eggs on the plates, then reached for the jelly as Garrett grabbed at his arm, trying to wrest the jar from his hand.
“On the toast, Dad, on the toast.”
Adam twisted his mouth as if considering the merits of toast and jelly versus scrambled eggs and jelly. He shot a glance at Garrett. “You’re sure it goes on the toast?”
The little boy giggled. “I’m sure, Dad.”
Frankie mumbled something under his breath. Something that sounded awfully close to stupid. Adam would address that later.
Once the boys were settled, he prepped a plate for Jenny, then rolled the wheelchair into the living room and eyed the stairs. This was not going to be fun.
He was halfway up the stairs, and starting to think installing a lift would be a brilliant idea, when Jenny appeared at the top. She wore jeans with a rip in the knee, and a sleeveless red blouse. She’d left her hair down around her shoulders, and Adam caught his breath.
“What are you doing?” She hurried to him and put her arm around his waist, taking some of his weight.
“Bringing you breakfast.” He gestured with the covered plate in his hand. Breakfast in bed had seemed like a good idea in the RV. A way to show her he could change, could be the man he’d once been. Halfway up the steps, with his knee and hip screaming at him to stop climbing, breakfast in bed seemed more like torture.
“You didn’t have to do that. Come on, let’s get you back down the stairs.”
He would protest, but at this point, sitting in the wheelchair for a little while sounded like a vacation from the pain. “I wanted to. You were right. I haven’t been pulling my weight around here. I’m sorry,” he said, as they reached the living room. “I didn’t realize I was taking advantage.”
“You weren’t... I just...” Jenny reached for the plate. She sucked her lower lip between her white teeth. “Thank you for breakfast.”
“You’re welcome.” He wanted to tell her things would be different now. He couldn’t just tell her, though, not after the distance he’d put between them because of his injury. He had to show her.
* * *
THE SILENCE BETWEEN them was deafening. It shouldn’t be this hard to talk to Adam, especially now that he knew where she stood. Especially when he was offering her apology eggs.
Seeing him on the stairs, the hard kink of his mouth showing the pain, she’d had to catch her breath. But he’d kept climbing. He wore an old Slippery Rock High T-shirt and jeans this morning, had Nikes on his feet. Normal clothes, so why were butterflies attacking her belly? And now she was staring at him.
The grandfather clock chimed eight, and she grabbed at the conversation starter. “How did you sleep?”
“Fine. The bed in the RV is remarkably comfortable.”
“Your mom put one of those memory foam mattresses in when they bought it, remember? She dragged me to every mattress store in Springfield until she found one willing to deal with the space issues of the RV.” That had been a fun trip. They’d shopped and had lunch, and Nancy had talked about the places she and Owen would see in retirement. Jenny had been making plans for the business expansion, filled with excitement about the future. Had that been only three years ago? It seemed like a lifetime.
Jenny sighed. Last week seemed like a lifetime ago. The doctor’s appointment seemed like a year.
“Right, and Dad and I went fishing.”
They’d been under contract with a construction company out of Joplin, but Owen insisted there was time, and if Nancy and Jenny were shopping, they could go fishing. Jenny had wanted to argue the point—she and Nancy taking a day off from the office and phones wasn’t the same as Owen and Adam not meeting a deadline—but she hadn’t. Because good wives followed their husbands’ lead. Adam wanted to go fishing with his dad, and so he went. In the end, they made the contractor’s deadline easily, so what had it really mattered?
It mattered because it was one more example of Adam doing what he wanted, and of her going along with him.
And today he’d made her breakfast, something he’d done only a handful of times in their married life. Because she’d given him an ultimatum? It would make sense. And it didn’t matter if breakfast was his way of manipulating her or was a true symbol of his contrition. Jenny wanted more out of life than to blindly follow Adam’s lead. She wanted to be her own person, have her own dreams, build a life in which she could be proud.
“I’ll just go check on the boys. Thank you, again, for breakfast.” Jenny turned toward the kitchen.
She was only twenty-six. There was still plenty of time to build a good life, plenty of time to stop blindly following.
But it was nice that he’d thought of her.
CHAPTER SEVEN
ADAM DIDN’T TELL Jenny he was going to physical therapy. He didn’t want her to feel obligated to take him.
More to the point, he didn’t want her to see how hard things were for him now.
The PT nurse adjusted his leg, setting the ultrasound machine under his knee, where his hamstring had separated.
“So you’re going to feel heat for a while, and maybe some light pulsing. You just have to lie here, relax, and let the machine and I do the work.”
He’d expected something more...strenuous than an ultrasound machine under his knee. “Then what?”
“We’ll work you up to the recumbent bike, maybe a slow treadmill, but that’s down the line. Once we have the go-ahead for the hip surgery. You know, if you’d started on this knee a few weeks ago, the hamstring might be showing better improvement.”
More ifs. Adam put his hands behind his head. If he’d listened to the doctors. If he’d started the physical therapy.
If he’d just stayed in the storm shelter at the warehouse instead of running for the day care where the boys were.
If he hadn’t made Jenny feel as though he didn’t want her around.
But he had done—or not done—all those things.
Seeing Jenny with that guy the day before had been more of an eye-opener than all the doctors’ appointments had been. This wasn’t just affecting him. Her life had changed, too. She was carrying all the burden, while he’d been sulking. Contemplating just walking away from everything. When he saw her at that table, though, he’d realized he didn’t want to walk away. He wanted to figure out how to make this life he’d been handed three months ago work for him.
“I’d like to try the recumbent bike today.”
The therapist kept working the ultrasound machine under his leg. After a few minutes, she looked at him. “It would be better to have a couple more ultrasound treatments first.”
“I can handle it.” The sooner he got the parts of his body he could control under control, the better.
The therapist shrugged, but when the half hour with the ultrasound was over, she led him to the bikes.
* * *
JENNY SAT IN the lounge area at the local boutique. It was just after noon, and she had a million things to do at work. But when a girlfriend called about picking out her wedding dress, you dropped everything to go. When two called at the same time, participation was mandatory.
Besides, she’d needed to get out of Buchanan’s before the sickly sweet scent of a dozen lilies made her ill. She hated lilies, and not just because the flower was her mother’s favorite. Although, she had to admit, that was part of the problem.
Twenty minutes after the lilies arrived on her desk, a dozen red roses had showed up. The combination of lilies and roses was almost too much to deal with. A rosebush? She was all over it. A peace lily in a great planter? Definitely. But not cut in vases with baby’s breath and greenery. Adam had only signed his name to the cards in the vases, which was just as well. She didn’t want flowery sentiments that he didn’t mean to go along with the flowers she didn’t need.
Savannah Walters, who had returned to Slippery Rock just before the tornado last spring, stepped out of the dressing room door. Her light caramel skin glowed against the white dress. Pearls and rhinestones embellished the bodice, and the low-cut neck showed just enough cleavage that Jenny knew Collin would be practically salivating when Savannah walked down the aisle toward him. She’d pinned her thin braids up, but long strands still fell over her shoulders.
“Too much?”
Jenny could only shake her head. She’d barely known Savannah before she left Slippery Rock to try out for a talent show in Los Angeles, but since her return, the two women had spent a lot of time together. Collin and Adam being such good friends had pushed them together, but the friendship that blossomed between them wasn’t only because their significant others were buddies.
“Exactly enough,” she said, sipping the iced tea the store clerk had brought her a few minutes before.
Savannah twirled before the three-way mirror, the skirt of the dress billowing prettily around her. Her feet were bare, and Jenny had an image of her walking between the apple trees at Collin’s orchard rather than down the aisle of one of the local churches. Barefoot. With flowers in her hair instead of the traditional bridal veil. Oh, it would be perfect.
“You’re sure?”
Mara, Savannah’s future sister-in-law, stepped from the other fitting room. “Definitely,” she said.
Mara and her fiancé, James Calhoun, had scandalized the town when news of their long-term affair hit the grapevines. But they were so perfect for one another that most of the gossip had died quickly. That, and the fact that they had one of the cutest two-year-olds in the universe. Everybody loved baby Zeke. James, who was in line to become the next chief of police, was a straight-and-narrow kind of guy. Mara, who had led the prankster ring that Collin, Adam and Aiden, James, and Levi Walters had been part of in high school, added levity to the couple.
Savannah gasped when she saw Mara’s dress. “Oh, yours, too.”
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