by Marie Force
“I wish I could tell you.”
“I guess I’ll never really understand it.”
“You know, I’m sure my doctor friend in New York would talk it through with you. I could call him next week and arrange something, if you’re interested.”
“You really think he would?”
“We worked very closely on the Gooding trial and spent a lot of nights eating cold Chinese together. He’d do it for me if I asked him to.”
“Thank you.”
“Now can I have just one little smile?”
“I can do better than a smile.”
His voice was rough with desire when he said, “Yeah?”
“Uh huh.”
He touched his lips to hers for a light kiss, and was startled when she reached up to keep him from pulling away.
Her mouth opened under his in invitation.
He had forgotten how potent her kisses could be, so sweet and yet so hot he melted into her. Their tongues mated in a dance as familiar to him as anything in his life. When he couldn’t stand another minute without having more of her, he finally drew back.
From the stunned look on her face, he could tell she felt all the same things.
He kissed the hand that had wrapped around his and then her lips again. “I have a sudden burning need to get to the hotel.”
“Since I seem to have the same need why are we just sitting here?”
He laughed and shifted the car into gear. When he would have floored it, he had to remind himself to drive slowly so he wouldn’t scare her.
The sun was setting over Narragansett Bay by the time they crossed the Newport Bridge and took the exit for the City by the Sea.
“It’s as pretty as I remember,” Carly said as they drove down narrow cobblestone streets with Colonial-era houses and gas-powered streetlights. “I can’t believe I’ve been less than an hour from here all these years.”
“Now that you’ve conquered your fear of cars, the whole world is open to you again. You can go anywhere and do anything you want.”
“When you put it that way, it’s sort of overwhelming.”
“Do you think you might want to go to college?”
She shrugged and rested her head against the leather seat.
“Seriously, if you could do anything you wanted, what would it be?”
Turning so she could see him, she said, “I don’t know.”
“Come on,” he urged. “There has to be something.”
“If I tell you, it’ll freak you out.”
“No, it won’t.”
She laughed. “Trust me, it will.”
“Okay, now I have to know.” When she still didn’t answer, he tried pleading. “Carly, tell me.”
Hesitating for another moment, she finally said, “I want to have a baby.” She said it so softly he almost didn’t hear her.
Almost.
He took his eyes off the road to glance over at her.
“I told you it would freak you out.”
“Do I look freaked out?” he asked indignantly.
“Yes!” She snorted with laughter. “You look like you just got hit by a bus.”
“I do not!”
“Yes, you do.”
They were still playfully arguing when he pulled up in front of a downtown hotel and handed the keys to a valet. Brian carried their two small bags, and within minutes, they were riding the elevator to the third floor. Their room looked out over Newport Harbor, which was packed with boats.
“Is this all right?” he asked, taking a quick look at the sunset.
“It’s beautiful. I can’t believe you arranged it so quickly.”
“My mother might’ve helped me,” he confessed.
She smiled. “Why do I feel so shy now that we’re finally here?”
“We don’t have to do anything. I’m happy to be in the same room with you.”
“You always did know just what to say to me.” She put her arms around him. “Didn’t you?”
He kissed her cheek and then her lips before he hugged her tight against him. “Do you want to take a walk or get some dinner? We can do anything you want.”
“Anything?”
“You name it.”
She surprised him when she reached for the hem of his polo shirt and tugged it up and over his head. “Anything at all?” she asked, looking up at him with a coy smile as she turned her attention to his chest. Her tongue flicked his nipple, drawing a gasp from him.
He took as much of that as he could handle before he buried his hands in her hair and captured her mouth in a kiss that went from zero to ninety in about two seconds flat. “Jesus, Carly,” he whispered as he unbuttoned her blouse and pushed it off her shoulders. “No one has ever been able to fire me up the way you do.”
Her face clouded briefly, and Brian wanted to shoot himself for reminding her, especially right then, that there had been others. He framed her face with his hands and looked into her eyes. “You’re the only one I’ve ever loved, the only one who’s ever really mattered to me. Do you believe me?”
She nodded and reached for him, wanting more. Her kiss told him she wanted everything.
Pulling frantically at clothes, they were suddenly unable to wait another minute for what they’d lived fifteen years without. As her bra fell to the floor, Brian tightened his arms around her and trembled at the feel of her soft breasts pressed to his chest.
She closed her hand around his erection, and he gritted his teeth against the burning need that spiraled through him.
“Carly,” he whispered as he caressed her face and leaned in to kiss her.
“I had forgotten.”
“What, honey?”
“How you feel.” She stroked him gently as her other hand cruised over his chest. “How it feels to be with you like this. I thought I remembered, but I didn’t.”
“There’s no substitute for the real thing,” he said as he urged her onto the king-sized bed. “What we wouldn’t have given for a room like this back in the day, huh?”
“We had that one night in Ann Arbor.” She wrapped her arms around him. “I’ve relived it a million times.”
He nuzzled her breasts. “You don’t have to relive it anymore, because we have every night for the rest of our lives to make new memories.” His hand traveled down to find her ready for him. “I don’t ever want to go to bed again without you next to me.” He teased her with his finger as he tugged her nipple into his mouth.
She gasped and squirmed under him. “I’m so afraid this is a dream, and I’m going to wake up to find you’re still in New York, that you never came home.”
Raising his head so he could see her eyes, he kissed her softly. “For the first time since I was last with you, I’m right where I belong, Carly, and I’ll never leave you again. I promise.”
“Did you bring, you know, protection?”
“Yes, but we don’t need it.”
“I’m not on the pill anymore. There wasn’t any point.”
“I know.” He kissed her breasts and worked at keeping his ravenous desire in check, afraid he would scare her if she had any idea how badly he wanted her.
She tipped his face up. “But we can’t just—”
“Why not?”
Her withering look made him laugh.
“You want a baby. Isn’t that what you told me?”
“Yes, but—”
“Since I wouldn’t want you going to anyone else to get what you want, you’ll have to settle for me.” As his tongue caressed hers, he entered her slowly, taking care to remember how long it had been for her. Rocking his hips against her, he looked down at her with a smug smile and whispered against her lips, “I told you I wasn’t freaked out.”
Chapter Eighteen
“Do you think it worked?” he asked an hour later.
She laughed and snuggled closer to him. “If it didn’t, it won’t be for a lack of trying.”
He laughed softly and kissed her. “Are you hungry?”
/> “Getting there.”
“Do you want to go out?”
She shook her head. “I never want to leave this bed again for the rest of my life.”
“Then room service it is.”
When he would’ve gotten up, she stopped him. “Don’t go just yet.”
“I was coming right back.” He turned on his side and brought her closer to him. Tracing a finger over her cheek, he asked, “Why so pensive all of a sudden?”
“What were they like?”
His eyebrows knitted with confusion. “Who?”
“The other women you were with. The women you married.”
He groaned and turned his face into the pillow. “We are not going to talk about that now.”
“Why not?”
“Because. This is a time to be looking ahead not back, and this night is about you and me. No one else.”
“Do you think I won’t understand that you were lonely, Brian? I will, because I was, too.”
“Why didn’t you ever go out with anyone else? There must’ve been no shortage of men who were interested.”
“It’s kind of hard to date when you can’t talk.”
“What if you could’ve talked? Would you have dated then?”
She shrugged. “It’s hard to say, but I doubt it. The only man I wanted was the one I couldn’t have.”
He closed his eyes and exhaled a long deep breath. “I was so sure I was doing the right thing when I said I was leaving for good. You know the main reason I did that was to try to force you to come with me, don’t you?”
“Of course I do.”
“I was desperate, Carly. And once that ultimatum was out of my mouth, it was kind of hard to take it back. I wished so many times I hadn’t made such an all-or-nothing stand. Now that I’m back with you again, I realize what a big mistake I made and how much I denied us both. Even a little bit with you would’ve been better than nothing.”
She brushed his hair off his forehead and kissed him. “You were eighteen years old and traumatized. Don’t beat yourself up for doing what you thought was right at the time.”
He was quiet for a long moment as he studied her face. “It took me three years to even think about being with someone else,” he finally said as he combed his fingers through her curls. “I didn’t bother dating or getting to know anyone, because that would’ve taken too much effort, and it didn’t really matter. I was lonely and bitter about losing you and everyone who mattered to me, so I was looking for a purely physical thing. I picked up a girl in an off-campus bar, and we went back to her place.”
Carly caressed his chest as she listened to him.
“I can only imagine what you must be thinking. It sounds awful, even to me,” he said as he looked up at the ceiling. “So we started, you know, fooling around.” He glanced over at Carly. “You’re sure you want to hear this?”
She nodded.
“One thing led to another, and we ended up in her bed. I kept wishing I’d had more to drink so I wouldn’t have been so aware of what I was doing or that everything about it—and her—felt wrong. And then I kind of lost my . . . enthusiasm, so to speak.” He brought Carly’s hand to his lips. “Even though we weren’t together anymore, I felt like I was cheating on you.”
Her eyes filled with tears. “Bri,” she whispered.
“I made a bunch of excuses about drinking too much and got out of there as fast as I could. I hit a pretty low point for a while after that. It was as close as I ever came to just saying fuck it and going home. I wondered if I was destined to be alone for the rest of my life, if that’s what I had doomed us both to. Then I met Beth. She lived in the apartment across the hall from me during our senior year. She had short dark hair and brown eyes that reminded me of yours. She’s really the only good friend I’ve made since I left home, but even she doesn’t know the whole story.”
“You were married to her, and you never told her?”
“I’ve never told anyone.”
Carly shook her head with dismay. “I thought it was harder to be the one who got left behind at home, but at least I had my family around me. You were so alone in the world.”
“Beth made me feel less alone, which is the one and only reason I married her. Of course, that wasn’t very fair to her, and it didn’t take me long to realize I’d made another huge mistake.”
“But you stayed with her for a while.”
He nodded. “She came home a few weeks before I graduated from law school and told me she’d met someone else and wanted a divorce. I could hardly blame her. She married Joe, and they’re very happy. I like him a lot. In fact, I just had dinner with them recently when they were in New York. I was lucky she forgave me for being a crappy husband and kept me as a friend.”
“What about Jane?”
Brian smiled. “Ah, yes. And then there was Jane. My mother couldn’t stand her.”
Carly’s eyes widened. “Really? I can’t imagine your mother not liking her own daughter-in-law.”
“Jane wasn’t much of a daughter-in-law or a wife. As my mother said in Florida, ‘There wasn’t an ounce of warmth in that woman.’”
“Then why’d you marry her?”
He winced. “She was a bit of a looker—tall, blonde, blue-eyed. You get the picture.”
Carly made a face. “Spare me any further details, please.”
He quickly added, “She was also an ADA, and she worked as much as I do, so it was more a marriage of convenience than anything. Then she started talking about having a family and buying a house in the burbs. I was like, whoa, that’s not what I signed on for. I certainly didn’t want that stuff with her. She was so self-absorbed that she would’ve been a horrible mother. Things got kind of ugly toward the end with her.”
“How long were you with her?”
“About three years, married for just over a year.”
“And since then?”
“I’ve been married to my work.”
Carly released a long deep breath and rested her head on his shoulder. “Thanks for telling me.”
With his finger on her chin he tilted her face up so he could see her. “I want you to understand . . . Both times, I knew in the very moment I was saying ‘I do’ that I was making a mistake, because everything inside me was crying out for you.”
“Brian.”
“I mean it.”
“I know you do.”
“Can I ask you something?”
“Of course.”
“It’s kind of a big deal.”
“Okay.”
“Which do you think would be worse? Being my third wife or never being my wife at all?”
Carly laughed until she cried. “Never being your wife at all,” she was finally able to say through her tears. “That would definitely be worse.”
“Good to know. Can I get up for a second?”
She lifted her arm and leg to let him up and then wiped the tears from her face.
He went over to rummage around in his bag and came back to flop down next to her. Perched on his pinkie was a diamond ring.
“What?” she cried. “Where did you get that?”
“It was my grandmother’s.” The utter shock on her face was exactly what he’d hoped for. “You should’ve seen how my mother bawled when I asked her to get it out of the safe for me today.” Wiping the tears from Carly’s face, he touched his lips to hers. “Remember the first time we got engaged, and I told you I’d get you a ring as soon as I could? You said I shouldn’t spend the money because we’d need it for things like food?”
Dealing with a new flood of tears, Carly nodded.
“Well, I knew this ring was coming to me when I was ready to get married, and I’d planned to give it to you the next day. Then everything happened, and I never got around to it. I regretted that, Carly. After all, we were engaged. I spent a lot of time after I left wondering if I’d given you the ring and made it official, if we might’ve somehow found a way to stay together.”
�
��Why didn’t you give it to Beth?” she asked softly.
He shook his head. “The only person I ever could’ve given it to is you.” Reaching for her left hand, he said, “Will you marry me, Carly? Will you make my life complete by spending the rest of your life where you should’ve been all along? With me?”
“Do you even have to ask?” she whispered.
He slid the ring onto her finger. “I love you, and I’m sorry it took me so long to come home to you.”
“All that matters now is you did and nothing has changed between us.” She raised her hand to take a better look at the ring. “It’s absolutely beautiful. Thank you.”
“I want to get married as soon as we can.”
Surprised, Carly glanced up at him.
“What kind of wedding do you want?” he asked.
“Something small. Is that all right with you?”
He snorted with laughter. “I couldn’t care less how we do it, as long as we do it—and very, very soon. I’ve lived long enough without you. Are you going to be okay with not getting married in church? They’ll frown on a two-time divorcee.”
“Father Joe might make an exception for us.”
“I don’t want you to get your hopes up, honey.”
“Maybe we can do something in my parents’ backyard and ask Father Joe if he would marry us. If we’re not in church, it might not be an issue.”
He tightened his hold on her. “I can’t believe we’re in bed together talking about getting married. I used to spend tremendous amounts of time imagining us just like this. I hope you won’t mind if I keep you in bed for most of the first year we’re married.”
She laughed. “Just the first year?”
“I’ll have to go back to work at some point so I can take care of you.”
“I don’t know if I can live in New York, Brian.”
“You don’t have to.”
“But your job—”
“We can live in the burbs, and I’ll commute, or I’ll quit and do something else.” He shrugged. “Whatever you want.”
“You love that job. I’d never ask you to quit.”