She sighed in contentment and walked her fingers across his stomach until she found what she was looking for.
“Whoa,” he said, “what are you doing?”
“You’re not tired, are you?”
“I could use a few more minutes.”
She looked at the watch on her wrist. “I’ll give you ten, and then it’s my turn. This next time we’re going to see what kind of patience you have.”
Daisy slowly drove the black sports car the short distance between her town house and Steve’s colonial, pulled into his driveway, and parked beside his new Hummer. She dragged herself from the car and walked bone-weary to the door. By the time she got there she was sick, her stomach rolling with each step she took. She hammered on the door and almost collapsed with relief when he answered with his cup of morning coffee still in his hand. Her eyes were large and teary, her blond bangs dark with perspiration. She knocked him aside with a sweep of her arm. “Get out of my way,” she cried, staggering toward the powder room. “I’m going to be sick!”
He swore under his breath and ran to get a towel. He soaked it with cold water and pressed it against the back of her neck when she emerged from the bathroom. “This is the fifth day in a row we’ve gone through this,” he said gently. “When are you going to hear about that damn dissertation?”
“Today. My adviser is supposed to call today.”
“It’s just a dissertation,” he told her. “It’s not worth getting sick over. If the committee doesn’t accept it, the world will continue turning.”
She collapsed onto a kitchen chair. “I want it to be over.”
“You aren’t the only one. I’m lonely. I’m tired of sleeping with Bob. The only time I see you is when you have to stop here on the way to work to get sick.”
“The nerves get to me first thing in the morning. And then I get carsick when I first start out.”
He looked at the engagement ring on her finger and wondered how much longer she’d continue to wear it. “You finished your dissertation weeks ago, but you’re still avoiding me. Why?”
She slumped forward and rested her head on her arms. “Because I’m a mess. Look at me! I’m sick! I can’t even handle the pressure of a doctoral dissertation. It hasn’t been just five days that I’ve been sick. I’ve been sick for two weeks. I burst into tears for no reason at all. I’m always tired. I’m a psychologist. I know the signs. I’m nuts.”
“Is that the clinical term? Nuts?”
“It’s not funny. I thought everything would fall into place once my dissertation was done, but my life is a shambles.”
“Why didn’t you tell me about this?”
“Because I hate being an emotional cripple; I hate you knowing I’m an emotional cripple, and I hate the idea of starting out a marriage as a mental case. I don’t know why you’re even attracted to me. Ever since we’ve known each other I’ve whined about my personal problems.”
“You’ve never whined. You might have babbled once or twice, but you’ve never whined.”
She pushed away from the table. “I’m feeling a little better,” she said. “I think I’ll be okay now.”
He supported her with his arm and walked her to the door. “Why don’t you take the day off?”
She shook her head. “It’s Friday. I’ll have the weekend, and then there’s only one week left until Menken returns.”
“How’s the new book coming along?”
“It’s not coming along at all. I can’t seem to find the energy to work on it. Maybe when this traffic job is done.”
“And the nursing home?”
A tear slid down her cheek. “I can’t bear to go to the nursing home anymore. Mrs. Nielson isn’t making any progress. She’s just slipping away. Mr. Bender has pneumonia.”
He cuddled her tight against his chest and wished he could help her. He stroked the hair back from her face and kissed her forehead. “I can’t make death and sickness go away, but I can be here at the end of the day when you need someone to talk to. It seems to me there’s a lot of latitude in geriatric counseling. Maybe you need a job that deals with the problems of younger seniors…people like Elsie.”
That brought a weak smile to her lips. “There’s not another person on the face of this earth like Elsie. What’s going to happen to her job when Menken returns?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t decided yet.” He kissed her again and held her at arm’s length. “Why don’t you come over after work, and I’ll throw some hamburgers on the old barbecue grill?”
“Last time you tried to cook hamburgers you set your chef’s apron on fire.”
“I think I’ve got the hang of it now.”
She loved him more than life itself, she thought. And deep down inside she wanted to believe things would work out. The natural optimist in her wanted to think she was suffering from extended PMS, or low blood sugar, or not enough fiber—and the proper diet would fix everything. A physical reason for her nervous stomach was much more acceptable to her than admitting she was an emotional basket case. “I’ve made a doctor’s appointment for after work today. He’s going to do some blood tests. Maybe I just need vitamins.”
“I’ll go with you.”
“No,” she said dully. “I need to do this myself. I’ll stop by on my way home. It should be around seven. Please don’t start up the grill until I get here. I hate to think of you going up in flames and no one around to hose you down.”
Steve began pacing in his living room at eight. By nine o’clock he’d called the state police and three hospitals. Daisy wasn’t in her town house, she wasn’t with Elsie, and she definitely wasn’t with him. He sank into a club chair and absentmindedly fondled Bob’s head. Daisy had been so despondent when she’d left in the morning. He should have driven her in to work and insisted on going to the doctor with her, he thought. The damn woman was too independent for her own good. She was sick, and she needed help—his help. That’s what love and marriage were all about. Marriage wasn’t just the good times and the sexy nights; it was making chicken soup for your wife when she had a cold and sharing a box of Kleenex when Mrs. Nielson wasn’t making any progress.
Last month Daisy had been the picture of health. She was a woman in love, and she was ready to get married. Something had happened in the interim to change all that. One day she’d been laughing with him over a pizza, then the next morning she’d burst into tears when he’d told her Bob was going to have puppies. He looked down at the dog. It had never occurred to him to check the plumbing under all that shaggy fur.
“I made a mess of it,” he said to Bob. “Somewhere along the line we had a severe breakdown in communication. She just pulled away from me.”
He heard a car door slam, and he was on his feet. He had the door open before Daisy reached the porch. “Where have you been? It’s after nine. Are you okay?”
Her eyes were wide and filled with tears. “I don’t have PMS or low blood sugar or irregularity.”
He gripped her shoulders hard, not sure if he was supporting her or himself. “What is it?”
The tears spilled out and streaked down her face. “I’m…pregnant.” She sobbed. “We’re going to have a baby!”
He was speechless. Air refused to leave his lungs. Little black dots floated in front of his eyes. There was a loud roaring in his head. “Baby?” he said. Then he crashed to the floor in a dead faint.
He was soaking wet when he came around. He blinked his eyes and sputtered. “I’m sorry, Mom,” he said. “I promise not to swim out so far next time.”
“I’m not your mom,” Daisy said. “I’m Daisy.”
“Oh yeah. Why am I all wet?”
“You fainted, and I poured water on you. That’s what they do in the movies.”
“Are we really going to have a baby?”
“Yup. That’s why I’ve been sick and tired and weepy. My hormones haven’t got their act together yet.”
“But you were crying over it. You were sobbing.”
&n
bsp; “Because I was so happy. Pregnant women cry a lot.” She sat beside him and pulled a grocery sack onto her lap. “Look, I stopped at the store and got some sparkling cider so we can celebrate. And wait’ll you see what else I bought!” She removed a little jar and held it in the palm of her hand. “Baby applesauce,” she said, bursting into tears again. “Isn’t it the cutest little jar you’ve ever seen?”
He pulled her onto his lap and wiped the tears away with his thumb. A baby! He’d been excited about having puppies, and now he was going to have a baby, too! “You’re going to marry me, aren’t you?” he asked.
“Of course.”
“Not just because of the baby?”
“Because I love you.” She opened the applesauce and tasted it on the tip of her finger. Then she fed some to Steve for practice. “And I think I’m going to take a job at the nursing home. I might not stay there for the rest of my life, but I’m going to try it for a while. I’d lost perspective on life as part of a continuum. There’s nothing wrong with aging. It’s natural and inevitable…like the birth of a baby.”
Steve popped the cork on the cider and they drank straight from the bottle. “To us,” Steve said.
“To the baby.”
“To family life.”
“To strained peas.” She reached into her purse for a tissue because she felt emotional again. “One other thing,” she said. “If it’s all right with you, I’d really like to get rid of the black car. I’m tired of removing men’s underwear from the antenna.”
Steve took a deep breath. “While we’re on the subject of cars I have a confession to make. I was the one who stole your old klunker. I’ve been hiding it in my garage. That’s why I’ve had to keep the garage locked and the windows blacked out. I did it because I didn’t want you to get stuck on the road anymore.”
“Sneaky but noble,” she said. “While we’re confessing, I may as well tell you Elsie and I got curious and broke into your garage one day last month while you were at work. We took the car and sold it. I needed the money to pay school fees.”
He stared at her in shock for thirty seconds before his mouth curved into an appreciative smile. “Daisy Adams, you’re sneakier than I am!”
She grinned back at him. “Don’t you ever forget it.”
If you loved
The Rocky Road to Romance
check out this sneak preview of
Love Overboard
by Janet Evanovich
Coming soon from HarperTorch
Ivan Rasmussen swirled the last of his coffee around the bottom of his mug, looked past the prow of his ship to the sloping green lawn of Camden Harbor Park, and wondered for the hundredth time in the past two hours what the devil had happened to his cook, Lucy. She was never late. Until now. Now she was beyond late, and because she was his friend as well as his cook, he was worried.
He squinted at a flash of color and movement toward the top of the hill, and unconsciously let his mouth fall open at the sight of a young woman rolling down the grass embankment. She came to a spread-eagled stop when she reached the cement footpath at the bottom and she uttered an expletive that carried across the short span of shoreline, bringing the first smile of the day to Ivan’s lips.
Stephanie Lowe, the woman Ivan had been watching, struggled to her feet, adjusted her battered backpack, and scowled at the grass stains on her knees. She was looking ahead to a whole week of cooking for Ivan the Terrible in exchange for free plumbing repairs to her bathroom. And if that wasn’t awful enough, she was the one who had to bring Ivan the good news that his usual cook was taking an impromptu vacation.
“Lord, I’m such a dope!” Stephanie muttered, smacking herself on the forehead, broadcasting her thoughts to all watching. Nothing like making a memorable entrance. If one more thing went wrong, she was going home. The heck with it all, she thought. She wasn’t crazy about this deal anyway. She’d seen Ivan only once, but he’d made a lasting impression on her. He was over six feet with gray-green eyes and strawberry-blond hair. And at the time of their meeting he’d been all packaged up in a custom-tailored, navy pin-striped suit that had made him look more like a chairman of the board than the captain of a schooner.
Stephanie searched the crowded harbor for the Josiah T. Savage, gasping when she realized it was directly in front of her, tied to a floating dock at the end of the cement path. It would be the last of the windjammers to leave the harbor, she thought with an inward groan—late to leave Camden because it was waiting for its cook. Unfortunately, its cook had suddenly decided to get married. Double unfortunately, its cook was her cousin Lucy.
Lucy had provided her with a few vital statistics on the Savage. It was a windship. A tall ship. A hundred-year-old, two-masted, coasting schooner with seventy feet of deck length, carrying twenty-two passengers and four crew members on six-day cruises along the island-strewn coast of Maine. Lucy’s description of her captain had been equally brief. Ivan Rasmussen, she’d said, was better known as Ivan the Terrible because he was terribly handsome, terribly eligible, and terribly slippery. Stephanie had her own reasons for believing he was terribly rotten.
She took a quick survey of the ship and spotted Ivan standing on deck, coffee mug in hand, looking at her as if she’d just dropped off the planet Mars.
Get it together, Stephanie, she told herself. Life was filled with trade-offs. If you packed away a whole bag of cookies, then you had to wash them down with diet root beer. This was just another of life’s cans of diet root beer. Cousin Lucy worked as a cook on Ivan’s windjammer. That morning cousin Lucy had decided to run off and marry Stanley Shelton. Stanley Shelton was a plumber. Stephanie desperately needed a plumber. Simple, right? Cousin Lucy got a honeymoon, and Stephanie got a toilet. Okay, no problem. Piece of cake. There was no reason to be nervous. Ivan should be happy to have her aboard, she reasoned. Where else would he get a cook on such short notice? She was actually doing him a favor.
Besides, after what he’d done to her, he deserved to eat her cooking for a week. Anyway, how hard could it be? She’d just whip up forty or fifty peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and send all the passengers off to an island in the dinghy. It might even be fun—a week on the high seas with the wind at her back and the salt spray in her face. It was going to be an adventure. A new experience.
She approached the boarding ramp and looked up into Ivan’s eyes, deciding they seemed only mildly predatory, more curious than anything else, narrowed against the glare, shaded by thick curly blond lashes. His hair was longer and lighter than Stephanie had remembered it, curling over his ears and along the nape of his neck. He’d grown a beard since she’d seen him—very close-cropped, oddly dark compared to his hair, and overwhelmingly masculine. He wore faded, frayed cutoff jeans that Stephanie admitted were perfectly proper but seemed sinfully erotic, molded to Ivan’s male contours.
She bridged the short span between wharf and ship, automatically taking inventory of her surroundings, and plastered a hopeful smile on her lips. “Hello.”
“Hello,” he responded, contained amusement clear in his voice.
There was a flicker of recognition in his eyes, but Stephanie knew he hadn’t placed her. She wasn’t surprised. He probably swindled women all the time. He probably couldn’t keep track of all the people he’d stuck it to. “Stephanie Lowe,” she said. “We met two months ago when I bought your house.” The very same house that had been falling apart piece by piece ever since she’d moved in, she silently added.
Ivan’s brows drew together. Stephanie Lowe, his cook’s cousin, the woman who’d bought Haben. How could he have forgotten Stephanie Lowe? Early Alzheimer’s disease, he decided. He was suffering from premature senile dementia. He’d seen Stephanie Lowe only briefly at the Realtor’s office, but he should have remembered. She’d worn a Billie and the Boingers T-shirt, and she’d been disappointed to find he didn’t own a parrot.
She was just as outrageous now as before, he thought. Her hair was short and shiny brown with wispy
bangs. It would have been pretty if it hadn’t been sticking out in all directions. He supposed she was one of those punk people. He did a mental calculation and put her at five-foot-seven, noticing she was slim and long-legged, wearing chunky silver, green, and white high-tops, bright pink socks scrunched down around her ankles, a pair of rumpled khaki walking shorts, and an orange tank top that was bright enough to get them through the best fogbank Maine could muster. She was probably there to complain about the house. Just what he needed to round out his morning. “Lucy tells me you’ve been having some problems with the house…”
“Problems?” Stephanie felt her control slipping. It wasn’t her strong suit to begin with. “Two weeks after I moved in, the front porch rotted out from under me. Then the water heater blew up and flooded the cellar. None of the windows will open, and it’s hotter than heck in—” She stopped when she saw the smile spread across his face. “Something funny about a water heater exploding?”
Ivan didn’t think there was anything funny about a water heater exploding, and he couldn’t understand how so many things could go wrong with his house. He’d left it in perfect condition. He loved Haben. It had belonged to his family for generations, and he would never have sold it if it hadn’t been absolutely necessary. He was smiling despite everything because Stephanie Lowe was a sight that inspired smiles.
“I think you’re cute when you get all steamed up,” he admitted, and playfully patted her cowlick. “Why is your hair sticking up? Is this a new style?”
Stephanie felt the top of her head. “When the upstairs toilet broke, it leaked onto the floor and collapsed the ceiling in the kitchen and downstairs bathroom. When the ceiling fell down in the bathroom, it took the mirrored door off the medicine chest and smashed it on the sink. Since that was the only mirror in the house, I had to comb my hair in front of the toaster.”
Ivan stared at her. Maybe she was wacko and was making all this up. No, chances were good that she was wacko, but she wasn’t making it up. Lucy had told him about the porch and the water heater, and Stephanie’s hair did look as though it had been combed in front of a toaster.
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