She took so long to answer that Aaron was forced to draw his own conclusion. “It doesn’t, does it?”
Felicia quickly shook her head. That wasn’t it. He had just stunned her. “I’ve never been on a picnic before,” she told him.
Aaron stared at her, not sure if she was pulling his leg. “You’re kidding.”
Why would she kid about something like that? “No,” she told him. “I’ve never had the time to go on one.” Or anyone to go with, she added silently.
She could just guess what Greg would have said to that if she had suggested going on a picnic to him. Most likely he would have said something to the effect that it struck him as childish—if anything it was a juvenile way to pass an afternoon.
When she had admitted that she’d never been on a picnic, Aaron arbitrarily made the decision for her.
“Well, now you have to go,” he told her. “Think of it as a rite of passage.”
His choice of words made her laugh, which in turn mercifully helped Felicia relax again. “Well, then I guess I’ll have to go. Tomorrow?” she asked to make sure.
He nodded. “Unless there’s something you have to do with my mother,” he qualified, not wanting to interfere with the program she had instituted for his mother.
“I’m sure if I explain this to your mother, she’d be willing to let me work her therapy around the picnic.” Felicia smiled at him, her eyes sparkling. “Your mother’s very accommodating that way. As a matter of fact, your mother’s got to be the nicest person I’ve ever had the good fortune to work with.”
Her assessment brought back memories for Aaron. “When I was a kid, everyone was always telling me how much they really loved my mother. Hell, even after I stopped being a kid, everyone I knew was crazy about her.” He laughed. “It made complaining about her really hard for me.”
She frowned. “Why would you complain about your mother?” she asked him, mystified. By his own admission, he really didn’t have anything to complain about. She had to be the most easygoing mother ever created.
Aaron shrugged. “Oh, you know. The usual teenage angst,” he explained. “But that’s why my friends had no patience with me when I went looking for a sympathetic ear. Every one of them said they would have given their eyeteeth to trade places with me. When I was growing up, my mother was always known as ‘the cool mom’ and she never even had to do anything out of the ordinary to earn that title. It was just a given. She was always the cool one,” he said with a note of nostalgia.
“How about your mom?” he asked Felicia, thinking he had monopolized the conversation long enough. Besides, he found himself wanting to learn something about her background. This was as good a place as any to start. “What was she like?”
She shrugged. “Not overly sure,” she admitted honestly. “I don’t really have a clear memory of her. She took off when I was five. I’m not even sure if she’s still alive.” She had tried looking her up once but had gotten nowhere.
He had really walked right into that one, Aaron thought. He hadn’t meant to bring up anything so painful.
“I’m sorry,” he apologized. “I didn’t know.”
“Why should you know?” she asked. “It’s not something that I advertise exactly. But thank you.”
“What about your father?” he asked, then quickly qualified, “Was he in the picture?” He knew that in a lot of cases the father was absent from the scene. There was no way that Aaron wanted to be guilty of making the same mistake twice.
“Only in a negative way,” she said, playing off the image of a “picture” that he had just raised. “My father worked for a living at a job he absolutely hated, so every night, when he came home, he drank to forget.” An ironic smile played on her lips. “Unfortunately,” Felicia told him with a philosophical shrug, “one of the things my father forgot was me most of the time.”
As he listened, Aaron could feel his heart going out to her. It sounded as if she definitely had a terrible childhood.
“Wasn’t there anyone else around to take care of you?”
She drew back her shoulders in an almost defensive manner. “I learned to take care of myself at an early age.”
He thought of some of the stories he had heard about. There were some that sent a chill down his spine, but there were others that had turned out well.
“What about social services?” he asked.
“What about them?” She asked the question so flippantly, Aaron felt as if he had his answer. But he pushed on anyway just in case he had guessed wrong.
“Didn’t anyone call them on your behalf?”
“You have to understand that my dad didn’t mingle with people. Hardly anyone knew that he had a daughter who was raising herself while he lost himself inside of a vodka bottle with a fair amount of regularity. So there was no real reason for anyone to call about my circumstances.”
“Didn’t you go to school?” he asked, thinking that her situation should have caught someone’s attention during those years.
“I did,” she answered. “But I kept to myself, did all my schoolwork because, aside from everything else, it made me feel normal and gave me a sense of purpose. And, in addition,” she added with a smile, “I got fairly good at forging signatures at a very young age.”
“And no one questioned anything?” he asked in disbelief.
“What can I say? It was a very crowded school, and with a little bit of effort—and self-preservation—I got lost in the shuffle.” She smiled at him. “Added to that, my report cards were pretty good,” she said with a touch of pride.
He didn’t doubt it, Aaron thought. Still, he was having a great deal of trouble picturing what she was telling him. It sounded as if she had somehow fallen through the cracks.
“So there was no one for you to turn to?” he asked again with compassion.
That’s just the trouble. I turned to the first person who showed me the slightest bit of kindness and I wound up paying for that dearly, she thought. But there was no point in her going into that. Or telling him even the slightest details about that life she had lived. Her ex’s abuse had just continued to escalate, growing harsher and harsher each time he lashed out at her, until she had finally escaped and made a new life for herself somewhere else.
But she wasn’t about to tell Aaron any of that because she didn’t want him thinking of her as a victim. Nothing would erase that look from his eyes faster than telling him about what she had gone through, and she wouldn’t be able to bear that.
Felicia still lived in fear, waiting for Greg to suddenly pop up and make her “pay” for all the imagined wrongs. But she had managed to convince herself that it was just that, nothing more than fear taunting her. There was no reason for Greg to pop up here.
He had no way of knowing where she had gone. She had been very careful about that. After all, it was a large country and people could still get lost if they exercised the proper caution.
The way she had.
“No,” Felicia finally said, answering Aaron’s question. “There was no one.” She hated lying, but the truth was far more complicated. “Anything else?” she asked him brightly.
Felicia wasn’t saying it, but he had a feeling he knew what she was secretly telling him by that look on her face. That he was asking too many questions.
“I didn’t mean to pry,” he told her.
“And yet, you did,” she replied. “Sorry, that just slipped out,” she apologized, realizing how harsh that must have sounded.
“I just wanted to get to know you,” Aaron explained. “Maybe that was wrong of me.” And then he smiled at her. It wasn’t a sexy smile, but it disarmed her. “I couldn’t help myself.”
This was how it started with Greg, she remembered. Somehow, he managed to work his way under her defenses. She hadn’t even realized what was happening—until it did. She needed to be wary and stay alert, she told herself
.
“Why is that?” she asked, her voice cool, distant.
“Because...” His eyes held hers, and suddenly, she had no way to hold him at bay. “I think I’m falling in love with you, Felicia Wagner. And I want to learn everything there is to know about you.”
She was quiet for a long moment, her eyes delving into his, searching for some indication that he was lying to her. But there was no evidence of that. He was being honest.
Still, she had learned the hard way that she was too trusting.
“Every woman likes to maintain a little mystery about herself,” Felicia finally told him.
“Mysteries are for people who like playing games,” he answered. “I don’t want to play games, Felicia. I want us to be honest with one another and get to know the real person beneath all the rhetoric.”
Oh, Lord, she could feel herself melting despite all her efforts to keep up a barricade. “You sound so serious,” she said, doing her best to sound just the opposite.
There was something in Felicia’s eyes that spoke to him, something that told him she had been hurt very, very badly. By the mother who deserted her, by the father who abandoned her morally and by someone else, someone he couldn’t put his finger on right now, Aaron thought. But he intended to, eventually.
Right now, he wanted her to know that she could count on him and that he would always be there for her, heaven help him—if she would just let him.
“I’ll be serious—or not,” he told her. “In short, I will be anything that you want me to be,” he promised, and she had a feeling that he actually meant it.
It was her turn to call the shots, Felicia thought. Her turn to lighten the moment because if it were anything else, anything more serious than that, Felicia was afraid that she wouldn’t be able to handle that, not feeling vulnerable the way she did.
“Then just be happy,” she told him in reference to his offer to be anything that she wanted him to be. “Otherwise, you’ll ruin the picnic with that gloomy face—and we wouldn’t want that.”
“Then you will come with me tomorrow?” Aaron asked. He had to admit that she had him wondering whether or not she would. For a woman who seemed so simple on the surface, she was very complex beneath it all.
Felicia smiled at him, reacting to the surprised look in his eyes. “Did you have any doubt that I would?”
“I have to admit that it did cross my mind,” he told her honestly. “You seem to be very straightforward, but underneath all that, you are an extremely complicated lady, Felicia.”
No, I’m really not. Just very wary. Felicia took his hand in hers. He looked at her in surprise. Somehow, this felt more personal, although he couldn’t quite say why. “Call me Fee,” she told him.
“Why? Do you like that better?” Aaron asked, curious.
“Yes, I do,” she answered. Because it’s my nickname, she told him in her mind. It was short for the name she was born with. The name she had abandoned when she moved to Chicago to elude Greg. But out loud she answered, “I think it’s kind of cute.”
“No,” Aaron corrected, putting his hands on her shoulders and drawing her closer to him. “You’re cute. And you’d still be cute if you answered to ‘Dolphin’ or ‘Pecan’ or any one of a whole slew of nicknames.”
She almost laughed out loud. “Pecan?” she questioned in wonder.
“The point is, the name doesn’t matter. You, however, do.” He combed his fingers through her hair, framing her face with his hands. “I just wanted you to know that.”
“Okay.” She inclined her head. “Consider me educated.” A noise from the other room caught her attention and she glanced over her shoulder again. “Shouldn’t we be getting back before your mother gets suspicious?”
“My mother doesn’t ‘get’ suspicious. As far as I know, she was actually made that way. But it’s a good kind of suspicion,” Aaron told Felicia with a wink. And then he added, “Trust me.”
“I guess I have to.” When he looked at her curiously, she added, “Since we’re going to be going on a picnic together.”
Aaron grinned at her. “Yes, we are,” he agreed. And with that he took her hand in his and brought her back into the family room.
Chapter 17
“Are you sure you don’t mind?” Felicia asked Nicole uncertainly.
While she was looking forward to the idea of going on a picnic with Aaron, she didn’t want to leave the woman she’d come to care for alone for half a day.
What if Nicole suddenly had a relapse and needed her? she thought.
“Mind?” Nicole scoffed at the mere suggestion. “I’m thrilled to death that both you and Aaron are going to be taking some well-deserved time off.” She placed a hand on the young woman’s shoulder. “If you want my opinion, dear, you both work much too hard. I think it’s a toss-up as to which of you are the most guilty of that.”
Felicia couldn’t help laughing. “Said the woman whose middle initial is W for workaholic.”
Nicole’s eyes narrowed. She wasn’t annoyed; she just wasn’t used to having her words used against her.
“We’re not talking about me, dear, we’re talking about you and Aaron,” her client reminded her. “Now, since you’ve fulfilled your morning obligation and practically run me into the ground with those new exercises you’ve come up with, you going out on that picnic in the park will give us both a chance to regroup for tonight’s extravaganza. Although, if you decide that it’s perfectly fine to cut back on my PT for one day and turn that picnic into a night out with Aaron, I would be very agreeable with that decision,” she added cheerfully.
Felicia blinked and then shook her head. “You really must be getting better, Nicole. You didn’t leave me any space to get in a word edgewise,” she said with a laugh.
“Are you trying to hurt my feelings?” Nicole deadpanned.
Felicia wasn’t sure if the woman was being serious or just pulling her leg, but she was taking no chances.
“No, no, of course not,” Felicia denied quickly. “I’m just making the point that you’ve never been this energized before. At least, not since I began working with you,” she qualified. She took the woman’s behavior as a sign that she was returning to her old self. “I guess this means that you won’t be needing me much longer.”
Nicole looked at her, appalled. “It means nothing of the sort. I’m just thinking about possibilities.”
“Possibilities?” Felicia questioned.
Nicole waved away the topic. She realized that she had already said too much.
“Never mind, dear. That’s a conversation for another day. Right now, you have a picnic to get ready for,” she told Felicia. “And, to that end, since you mentioned going on a picnic yesterday, I took the liberty of preparing a little something for the two of you.” With that, she led Felicia over to the spare refrigerator in her garage.
Opening the door, she took out the picnic basket she had packed that morning before she had begun her morning exercises with Felicia.
Felicia stared at the picnic basket. That had to be the largest basket she had ever seen. “Oh, Nicole, you didn’t have to do that.”
Nicole gave her a patient, although somewhat long-suffering look.
“You’re missing the point, dear. This is something that I wanted to do. Preparing special meals is, very plainly, what I do. It’s what kept me going in the early days,” she told the younger woman. “And since you mentioned that this is your very first picnic, I wanted it to be memorable—something special,” she emphasized with a smile.
“Now, go get ready,” Nicole urged in the next breath. “You have a perfect day for it and we don’t have all that many perfect days in Chicago. It’s usually too hot, too humid or just too rainy. My advice is to take advantage of it before the weather suddenly decides to reverse itself. Now shoo,” she said, waving Felicia up to her room.
She was treating her like a daughter, Felicia thought with a smile, finding the idea exceedingly pleasing.
Felicia quickly ran up the stairs to get ready. The last thing she wanted to do was to keep Aaron waiting. That was way too predictable. Besides, she was very excited about this adventure and wanted to be ready for Aaron when he rang the bell.
Also, Nicole was getting better at an incredible rate, she noted. Who knew how much time she had left in this house? She felt she had to make the most of it while she could.
Since it was summer and the weather was definitely leaning toward being hot right now, Felicia decided to wear a pair of navy blue shorts, a white tank top and a pair of sandals.
She thought about putting her long blond hair up in a ponytail, then decided against it. Looking at her reflection in the mirror, she thought leaving her hair down made her look more at ease.
Ready, she was on her way downstairs when she thought she heard the doorbell ring.
Her heart jumped.
Aaron.
He still wasn’t using his key, she thought. She knew he had one and wondered if his refraining from using it was his idea, or his mother’s. She had a feeling it was probably his.
Rather than speed up, she decided to come down the stairs a little more slowly, as if deliberately making an entrance.
And maybe, in a way, that was what she was doing—because she wanted to make an impression on Aaron.
If she was in any way undecided as to whether or not she had chosen the right outfit, the expression on Aaron’s face settled the matter for her.
He had been speaking to his mother when, hearing Felicia come down the stairs, he looked over toward her.
“Wow,” he whispered, unaware that he had said anything as his mouth dropped open in awe.
Nicole took in his reaction as well as the outfit that Felicia was wearing in one quick, sweeping glance. She smiled to herself, pleased on several counts.
“Careful, darling,” she whispered with a laugh to her son. “You’re drooling.”
Aaron’s head popped up as he quickly snapped out of his trance. It took him a bit longer to locate his tongue. When he finally did, he told Felicia, “I like your outfit.”
Colton 911: Secret Defender Page 15