by Elle Kennedy
Inhaling the warm salty breeze, Ellie gave in. “There were complications after the accident.”
Vivian’s gaze offered encouragement. “What kind of complications?”
“The miscarriage.” She bit her lower lip. “After I lost the baby, the doctors told me I couldn’t have any more children.”
A short silence descended, until Vivian broke it with, “Are you sure? I mean—”
“I had an emergency hysterectomy, Viv.”
The confession hung in the air, making it difficult to breathe. Her lungs heaved, desperate for oxygen, but the air was laced with a bitter taste that choked Ellie’s throat. She’d said it. After months of bottling it up inside, she’d said it out loud.
“That’s why Scott left me,” she continued, surprised by how steady her voice sounded. “He said he refused to be with a woman who couldn’t offer him children.” She sucked in a breath. “He said I was damaged.”
“Excuse me? Are you serious?” When Ellie nodded, Vivian let out a curse. “Well, then he’s insane. Not only insane, but disgustingly insensitive. In fact, the only thing he is, pardon my French, is a complete asshole.” Shock and anger glittered in her eyes. “Don’t you ever believe that.”
The fury in Vivian’s voice touched her. After the accident, she’d been angry too. Her rage and indignation had helped her get through those first couple of weeks, but when the reality of the situation sunk in, shame and sorrow had replaced her volatile emotions. Her career was over, her fiancé had left her, her baby was gone, and as time passed she’d begun to wonder. If her own fiancé couldn’t handle her situation, what other man would?
“I don’t believe it,” she said quietly. “Most of the time, anyway.”
“Most of the time?” Vivian echoed. “Oh no, hon, there is no truth whatsoever in what that man said to you. You’re a gorgeous, intelligent, desirable woman. The fact that Luke is panting after you proves that.”
Ellie had to admit Viv’s words were an echo of her own thoughts. Last night, in Luke’s passionate embrace, she’d felt more like a woman than ever. The way his strong hands had cupped her breasts, the way his erection had pushed against her sex. Luke had made her feel something she hadn’t in a long time. Wanted.
It would be so easy to fall into bed with him. If she pushed him hard enough, he’d give in sooner or later. He’d probably be an amazing lover too. But she also knew if she slept with him, she’d be risking her heart. She’d been half in love with him all her life. She didn’t think she could handle being just another notch on his belt.
“It does feel nice knowing Luke is attracted to me.” She slugged back the rest of her water and pushed the glass away. “But it would be nicer if he was here because he wanted to be and not because Josh forced him to—”
Before she could finish her sentence, Vivian broke out in a fit of coughs. She reached for her iced-coffee and took a long sip, then flashed an apologetic glance. “My throat. It got dry all of a sudden.”
The explanation was as flimsy as they came, but for the life of her, Ellie couldn’t figure out what she’d said to make Viv look this nervous. She didn’t get the chance to question her, either, as Vivian cleared her throat and said, “So, ready to get out of here?”
Ellie nodded, and the two women dropped a few bills on the table to pay for their drinks then left the little patio. They had driven to town in Vivian’s bright yellow Jeep, parked it on the outskirts of the downtown core and opted to stroll the strip. Neither woman said much as they walked down the sidewalk, dodging passersby and firmly shaking their heads at the merchants who tried to pull them over.
They were halfway to the car when Ellie stopped in her tracks. “Oh my God! It’s perfect.”
She stared at the display window of San Valdez’s only decent clothing store, mesmerized. Vivian came up beside her, took one look at the mannequin and chuckled. “Luke will faint if you ever wear that around him.”
“That’s the plan.” Without another word, Ellie strode into the boutique and made a beeline for the cash counter. The plump, dark-haired saleswoman standing there barely had time to say hello as Ellie pointed to the dress and said, “I want that one.”
The woman followed Ellie’s finger and smiled knowingly. “Oh yes. Wonderful selection.” She had a heavy Spanish accent. “You are size five, six, yes?”
“Six.”
“I will get you dress in this size.” The woman scurried past a curtain that led into a back room. She returned seconds later with the dress and handed it to Ellie.
With a small grin, Ellie ran her fingers over the red satin then held the garment over the T-shirt and denim shorts she wore. The silky material just barely reached her lower thighs and the neckline plunged so low she knew Luke’s eyes would pop out when he saw her in the dress. Which is why she had to have it.
“How much is it?” she asked the saleslady.
“One hundred and twenty.”
The price was steep, but worth it. Grin widening, Ellie reached into her purse and pulled out her wallet. “I’ll take it.”
Moments later, her bank card was being swiped through the outdated machine and Ellie was punching in her PIN. She looked over at Vivian as she waited for a receipt, unable to contain her glee. “So here’s the plan,” she said. “I’ll ask Luke out tonight, wear this dress and—”
“There is problem with card.” The sales lady cut her off, smiling apologetically.
“What kind of problem?” Ellie asked in surprise.
The woman handed her a slip that said “Transaction Declined. Exceeded daily limit”. She furrowed her brows as she read the cryptic words. “Limit? I don’t have a limit.”
“Maybe it’s the machine,” Vivian suggested. “There’s an ATM around the corner. You could try withdrawing cash.”
Ellie told the woman to hold the dress for her, then left the store. Her sandals clicked against the cracked pavement as she headed for the machine, with Vivian struggling to keep up. “I don’t get it,” she muttered to herself.
She went through the motions of sliding her card into the ATM, punching in her PIN and the amount she wanted to withdraw, and waited.
“What the hell!” She cursed as the machine spat out a slip of paper that again told her she’d exceeded her limit. Confusion muddled her brain as she stared at it. “This makes no sense,” she finally said, turning to Viv. “The only time I’ve had a limit on my withdrawals was in college. Josh set up the account for me but when I graduated we changed it to…” She suddenly growled. “That little—”
“Come on, honey, I doubt your brother would stoop so low,” Vivian interjected.
“Are you kidding? This is exactly his style!” Ellie noticed her friend’s cheeks had turned a rosy pink. She narrowed her eyes. “Are you getting heatstroke or something?” She didn’t let Vivian answer, just changed the subject back to her slimy brother. “He thinks if he screws around with my bank account I’ll come crawling home to him. Ha! Does he think I’m so dependent on him that I can’t pick up the phone and call my own bank to undo what he did?”
“Ellie—”
She tightened her lips in a line of fury. “Well, he can think again.”
“Ellie—”
“Vivian, I need to borrow one hundred and twenty dollars. Then I would like a ride home so I can call the bank. And once I finish doing that, I’m going to call Joshua Dawson and give him a piece of my mind.”
“You froze her account?” Vivian slammed the front door behind her and stormed into the living room, where she found Josh wearing nothing but bright red swim trunks that sat low on his lean hips. Droplets from his dark hair fell onto his bare chest, sliding down his wiry chest hairs in rivulets. He’d obviously just come in from a swim and he looked good enough to eat.
Good thing Vivian wasn’t hungry. She was furious.
“I didn’t freeze her account.” Josh shrugged, then reached for the fluffy blue towel sitting on the armchair and began dabbing his torso with it. “I mere
ly called the bank and requested a daily limit of ten dollars be implemented.”
He looked so smug Vivian wanted to strangle him. “What gave you the right?” she demanded.
“Ellie and I opened the account together. She apparently forgot to remove my name from it, which gives me the right to do anything I please.”
“You’re an asshole.” The vicious words flew out of her mouth before she could stop them and the verbal attack left her feeling stunned.
What was she actually angry about? Did her rage come from her defense of Ellie or was she really just pissed off at herself for letting Josh get to her last night?
Still want me to stop? His low taunting voice floated into her head as a reminder that she’d had every opportunity not to let things get as far as they had. Stop. All she’d had to say was one little word and nothing would have happened. But had she done that? No, of course not. And now she was forced to deal with the consequences of her own stupidity.
God, she didn’t want him here anymore. Though he was staying in the guest room at the end of the hall from her bedroom, it still wasn’t far enough. Last night she’d lain awake, wanting so desperately to go to him, to slide into bed next to him and let him finish what he’d started in the living room. She hadn’t given in to temptation, though. Instead she’d spent the night tossing and turning, unsettled by the thought of Josh in her home, frightened of the way he made her feel and upset with herself for letting herself feel it.
What had come over her? She’d had no control yesterday, no willpower. Instead of pushing Josh away, she’d allowed him to get closer. She was forty-four years old, for Pete’s sake. She knew the difference between love and lust. Knew the price of getting involved with the wrong man. The last time she’d done it, she wound up pregnant and alone. This time, however, she wasn’t worried about herself. It was Josh she was concerned about.
He didn’t get it. He deserved to be with a nice young woman who could give him a minivan full of children. Not her, not a woman who was pushing fifty, a woman whose body was past its prime, a woman with a grown daughter who was practically his age. A woman he’d no doubt grow tired of.
She wasn’t beating up on herself. She knew she had a lot to offer—to an older man. A man who would be satisfied with a casual affair.
Josh Dawson wasn’t that man.
“I’m an asshole?” he echoed. His lips twisted in a bitter grimace. “I thought I was just the pool boy.”
She fought back a rush of guilt. “You expected me to tell my daughter I was with her best friend’s brother?”
“Yes.” Josh’s nostrils flared. “But I didn’t realize what a coward you were.”
“A coward?” She shook her head, suddenly wanting to laugh out loud. “See, Josh, this is exactly why we can’t be together. You’re a kid. Impulsive, immature, throwing out insults when you don’t get your way. A child.”
Vivian instantly regretted her words as Josh’s face turned red with anger and disbelief. Not to mention the flash of pain that was getting oh-too-familiar. She’d hurt him by saying that, but maybe that’s what it would take for him to get the picture. To understand that the two of them were colossally wrong for each other.
She stood there quietly, watching various emotions dance in his blue eyes like colors in a kaleidoscope. Pain turned to irritation. Anger to bitterness. And finally a deep shade of determination.
“I’m a kid, huh?” He chuckled softly. “We’ll see about that.” Before she could reply to that cryptic remark, he spoke again. “Do you have access to the Internet on that thing?” He gestured to the computer sitting on the desk next to the kitchen doorway.
She nodded wordlessly.
“Good. Go boot up the computer while I make a call, will you, Viv?”
“So what exactly am I looking at?”
Josh watched as Vivian studied the photograph filling the computer screen. He’d asked his secretary to scan and email all the photos in the album he kept in his desk and, efficient as always, she’d sent the images in less than ten minutes. It had taken a few minutes to download everything, but now, as he stood behind Viv’s chair and saw her wrinkle her nose, his confidence surged.
A child? He still couldn’t believe she called him that, especially seeing as he’d stopped being a child at the age of fifteen. Immature was the most unsuitable adjective Viv could’ve picked to describe him. And he couldn’t wait to show her just how wrong she was.
But first things first.
“I’ll explain about the pictures in a minute,” he replied. “First we make a deal.”
She twisted in the chair to face him, green eyes wary. Why did she always have that expression on her face when she looked at him? As if it unsettled her just being near him.
“What kind of deal?” Suspicion lined her tone.
“I want to take you out on a date.” He held up his hand before she could object. “After you hear me out, if you still think I’m a kid, fine, I won’t push you anymore. I won’t touch you or kiss you or so much as sneeze around you. But—” he smiled slightly “—if after seeing the pictures you change your mind about me being—what was it?—right, an impulsive, immature child, I reserve the right to take you out. Do we have a deal?”
He lifted his shoulders awaiting her answer. She didn’t seem thrilled at the prospect of the two of them going out, but she didn’t look repulsed, either.
After biting her bottom lip again, she finally sighed. “Fine. It’s a deal.”
“Good.” He leaned forward and put his hand on the computer mouse, catching a whiff of Vivian’s perfume as he bent. She didn’t wear those fruity, flowery scents most females his age liked to douse themselves with. Viv’s scent was more subtle, lemony, intoxicating, the kind of perfume a mature woman wore.
He inhaled deeply, branded the sexy smell into memory, and clicked on the first image. A pig-tailed nine-year-old Ellie beamed out at them, clad in a pink tutu and white ballet slippers. “This was Ellie’s first major recital,” he explained. “It fell on the same weekend my entire junior class went to Los Angeles for the year-end trip. I didn’t go.”
He moved to the next photo before Vivian could comment. “This is my high school graduation.” He cringed at the out-of-focus shot of him accepting a diploma. “Don’t mind the blurriness, Ellie’s camera-challenged, but see all those students standing there with me?”
Vivian nodded. “Yeah.”
“To this day I don’t know any of their names. I graduated with them a year early instead of with my friends. I was sixteen.”
“Josh, what’s the point of all this?”
He moved the mouse. “Okay, me graduating from college, blurry again thanks to my sister. I was twenty.” He paused. “You know I never went to a single party in college?”
“Why not?” she murmured, her face fixed on the monitor.
“I spent days attending classes and nights helping Ellie with her homework. Weekends I’d drive her to ballet.” He chuckled. “I don’t think my aunt even knew Ellie and I were living in her house. She was out day and night, doing God knows what. She was living off my uncle’s life insurance, so she didn’t have a job or any discernible responsibilities to take care of. She certainly didn’t take care of us.”
He absently skipped a few of the images, mostly Ellie at recitals, and clicked on one of himself and a pretty redhead. “Me and Cynthia, my first serious girlfriend. This was taken at a bed and breakfast we went to for one night while Ellie stayed at a friend’s.”
“You look exhausted.” Vivian touched his face in the photograph and ran her index finger over the dark circles under his eyes.
“I was. I’d stayed up the night before cramming for the LSATs, then spent the morning taking Ellie to the dentist, ballet practice and then to her friend’s house.” He offered a wry grin that Vivian didn’t see with her back turned to him. “Can you believe I fell asleep right in the middle of sex? Needless to say, Cynthia dumped me the next day.”
Josh went t
hrough the pictures one by one, explaining each one calmly and with a little bit of self-deprecation. Damn, he really had led a boring life, hadn’t he? Once he felt he’d hammered his point home, he logged off the Internet and switched off the computer, waiting for Vivian to say something.
When she didn’t move, he firmly grasped the back of her chair and swiveled it around. “So?” he said, crossing his arms over his chest. He pinned her down with an expectant stare.
She stayed silent, making him want to reach out and shake her. Christ, hadn’t those pictures been the proof she needed? To him, the images made everything pretty damn obvious. The moment his parents had died, any immaturity on his part had died with them. He’d spent his teenage years parenting his sister. He’d studied for law school instead of partying. He’d forsaken relationships so that he could build a stable career for himself, so that his little sister would be taken care of for the rest of her life. He’d never once dropped any of his burdens or responsibilities on someone else, and anyone who knew him now could argue that he was the oldest thirty-year-old on the goddamn planet.
So why the hell didn’t Vivian Kendrick see it?
“I’m not a kid,” he said, slightly startled by the menace in his tone. He quickly softened it. “I’m a man, sweetheart. I worked my ass off to become a lawyer, and like you, I spent most of my life taking care of someone else.” His jaw tightened when Vivian still didn’t answer. “If you can’t see that, Viv, maybe I really am wasting my time.”
He gave her a second to interject. Another second to object. Then he clenched his fists and swiftly turned away.
Her silence told him more than any words could say. She still thought he was a child. She still wouldn’t let herself open her heart to him. He heard it loud and clear, despite the deafening quiet of the room.
Damn her.
Without glancing back, he strode down the hallway to the guest bedroom. His suitcase sat empty at the foot of the bed and he stared at it, knowing it was time to pack up and leave. What the hell else was he supposed to do? He’d given it his best shot, tried to make Vivian realize they were good for each other, but she didn’t see it. No use sticking around and putting himself through any more misery.