A Family Come True (19 page)

True. She would get through whatever came next. But that didn’t make him feel any better.

“You won’t be getting rid of me completely, you know. I’ll still come back for visits, watch the Bug grow up, all of that.” He hesitated as an unforeseen complication to that plan made itself known. “Unless...I mean, with Xander on the scene now if you think that might be too confusing for her...”

“Stop that.” Her fingers pulled free. “You have been part of her life since before she was born. She needs you.”

As if to emphasize her words, a small whimper sounded over the monitor. Darcy sat straighter, poised to act. He stopped her with a hand on her back.

“Easy. That was Lulu.”

“It... Oh. Jeez.” Her laugh was closer to a sigh. “No wonder it sounded deeper than usual. Guess I really am tired.”

She dropped to her pillow, flat on her back. His eyes had adjusted to the dim light and it was easy now to see the way she stared at the ceiling, her head rigid on the pillow, the dark pattern of her nightgown against the white sheets.

There was nothing seductive about her pose. If anything, her fingers clutched the sheets almost defensively, as if she were using them as a shield, which heaped another log on his guilt fire. Her hair stuck up on one side and sort of mashed against her head on the other, and the penguins frolicking across her nightgown were more likely to induce laughter than lust.

But, God, if only he could push the damned quilt out of the way and hold her...

“You really missed them, didn’t you?” Her voice was small and wistful. Damn it. He shouldn’t have told her this way.

On the other hand, now everything was out in the open. If there had been any chance of them turning make-believe into reality, well, it was so far off the table now that even Lulu wouldn’t bother chasing it.

But none of that answered her question.

“Yeah. I did. I want to be part of a family again.”

Moxie’s line about Darcy and Cady being his family taunted him. He pushed it to the back of his brain.

“And...how are things with Carter? Did you talk any more with him tonight?”

“We’re getting there.”

“But you—”

“Give it time, Darce.”

“Time. Right.” She rolled onto her side, turning her back to him. “I think I can sleep after all. G’night, Ian.”

“’Night.”

He closed his eyes. Too bad it didn’t block out the truth he’d been too slow to see—that leaving the everyday life he’d built with Darcy and Cady was going to be even harder than coming back to Carter and Taylor.

Though maybe that hadn’t been an oversight.

Maybe it had been self-preservation.

* * *

H
E WAS LEAVING HER.

An hour after Ian dropped his bomb, Darcy accepted that her ability to fake herself into sleep wasn’t remotely as successful as her ability to fake a relationship. She eased out of bed, grabbed her supplies and almost ruined the whole maneuver by screaming out loud when something brushed her leg. Thank God she realized it was Lulu before she woke the whole house—or, most important, Ian.

“You are one lucky pup,” she whispered as soon as she and Lulu were in the hall with the bedroom door closed softly behind them.

Moving slowly she took herself to the sunporch, where the clan had gathered the previous afternoon. She sat on the glider where she and Ian had presented the Xander case to his family—had it really been only about twelve hours ago?—and rocked slowly back and forth, trying to lose herself in the rhythm of the creaks.

They had been a team sitting here. She and Ian, working together. Almost like a family.

And now it was all going to change.

The laptop lay untouched at her side. Who was she kidding? Even if she tried to address her to-do list, she would end up typing
he’s leaving, leaving, leaving
in the middle of some code. Work was going to have to wait until nap time, until she’d had a chance to slap some kind of bandage on the hurt.

Because, oh, yeah, she definitely would have become adjusted to this by afternoon. Sure she would.

The worst of it was that she couldn’t blame him. The job
did
sound perfect. He
did
belong with his family again. Yes, she had been pissed with them all when she’d learned how they handled the Great North Love Triangle, and Carter and Taylor were still on her list of those she would consider sacrificing to the zombies, but now that she had met them, seen the way they came together to help her—okay. Maybe they hadn’t handled the mess the way she would have wished, but she was pretty sure they had done the best they could at the time, when emotions had been running high and logic had been gasping for breath.

So, yes, he had every right to want to move home. She hoped she had sounded cheery enough after he’d broken the news. She didn’t want him to go, Lord no, but she couldn’t make him feel any worse about leaving. He’d dealt with enough the past couple of years. Her job was to let him know he’d be missed but that he had her blessing and understanding, that they would be glad to see him whenever they could swing a visit. Falling apart could wait.

She opened the laptop, ordering herself to ignore the sudden blurriness of the screen. She couldn’t do anything that required concentration, but she could do something. Check some links, reply to emails, make a grocery list for when she got home...

Home. Where she would need a new tenant. Maybe a woman this time. Someone who traveled a lot so there would be no danger of getting friendly, letting herself rely on someone else, starting to feel like...

She blinked and wiped her face. Damn it. She was
not
going to cry over this. They would still see him. It wasn’t forever. Not the way it had been when her dad had left.

But it wasn’t going to be the same.

And, dear Lord, she was going to miss having him around.

Lulu yawned and rolled over. Darcy scrunched her bare feet into the dog’s warm side.

“He’s going to take you, too, isn’t he, girl? Cady is going to...”

Oh, Cady.

“I promised her I wouldn’t be like my mom,” she whispered to Lulu. “I promised her I’d keep things steady, like when my dad was around. But now it’s all going to hell anyway.”

No. She had to find the silver lining. Surely there was one. Wasn’t there a rule about that?

Okay. For one thing, she...well...she could have her garage back. No more hammers pounding at all hours, no more hot forge, no more parking her car outside in the snow. True, he had always cleaned it off and warmed it up for her all through winter, but whatever.

That was one. And...um...

“Ooh,” she said to Lulu. “No more wondering if I’m going to run into someone doing the walk of shame across the backyard.”

Not that there had been much chance of that. Other than a handful of times soon after he’d moved in, the only person doing that particular walk on her property had been, um, Xander.

“But only that once,” she assured Lulu, who thumped her tail on the floor. Female sympathy. Power to the woman.

Of course, if things had turned out differently tonight...

Wait a minute.

“Hey, girlfriend.” She dropped sideways onto the glider and whispered to the dog. “If the big reason I couldn’t do anything with him was because I didn’t want to mess up a good thing...but everything is seriously messed up right now anyway...is there any reason why I shouldn’t jump him?”

Lulu cocked her head as if she were thinking it over. Darcy followed suit, turning the idea over in her mind, examining it from every angle. She needed to be rational about this.

Everything was changing already, whether she wanted it to or not.

They were already sleeping together.

People already thought they were involved.

She knew him. She liked him. She trusted him. And, yeah, she wanted him.

“A year and nine months is a long time to go without,” she said to Lulu, who whined. Oops. Maybe not a good plan to discuss her sex life with a dog who was a virgin.

“Though who knows what’s happening when you take off at the dog park.”

She bent down once more and scratched behind Lulu’s ears.

“I feel like I’ve been thrown on a roller coaster backward and blindfolded,” she said. “If everything is getting turned inside out anyway...would it be so wrong to grab this one little corner of my life and try to turn it into something awesome?”

Thump thump thump
went the tail.

“Three thumps?” Darcy thought for a moment, then grinned. “Thump thump thump. Go for it.” She ran her hand down Lulu’s back. “Girlfriend, I like the way you think.”

* * *

I
AN WOKE TO
early-morning light that revealed an empty space on the other side of the bed and a hollowness in his gut that he knew had nothing to do with hunger. And that was before the memories jumped him.

Ma was right. He’d had to tell Darcy about the move, though not for the reasons Ma had intended. But, God, he wished he’d handled it differently. Throwing it out like that, no warning, no explanation...

If he believed the stuff he’d learned back in psych class, blurting out the job offer was probably a defense thing. After all, they had been alone, the rest of the house had been asleep, they had been in a bed with all those double entendres stirring up thoughts that were too damned vivid for anyone’s good—yeah. Freud or whoever might have been right about that one.

All he could do now was move forward and hope to hell he didn’t cause her any more hurt. Which he would have if he’d done as he’d wanted and leaned over the stupid jelly roll and kissed her until she had no doubt that convincing other people they were involved was no hardship at all, at least not on his part.

That would have been fine and dandy for a while, but she’d had enough changes thrown at her in the past forty-eight hours. She needed him to be her rock. And what kind of selfish jerk would shift what was between them, even move into friends with benefits territory, when he knew he was only going to be around part-time at most? Yeah, that would be the way to make a woman feel secure, all right. Announce he was leaving town, then jump her. As if he didn’t care enough to start something when he was going to have to deal with it all the time, but from a distance, hey, no problem!

No, it was better this way. For her, for him, for Cady and Xander and Moxie and probably even Lulu, though he might be working a bit hard to convince himself of that one.

He peeked in on Cady—still asleep—and looked in vain for Lulu. She must have left with Darcy. Maybe he should take advantage of the peace and shower away his regret.

Except when he padded into the bathroom, Darcy was everywhere.

Her purple-and-white travel toothbrush sat neatly capped beside his. Her brush lay on the counter, one lone hair curling from the bristles. A women’s daily vitamin bottle watched over his razor.

He sucked air between his teeth as she surrounded him. He’d been in her bathroom at the house many times. None of these items were new to him. But he had never before seen her toothbrush beside his, her moisturizer next to his shaving gel, the hair from her brush reaching toward his comb. It smacked of togetherness and belonging and coupledom.

Worse, it didn’t feel at all strange. Seeing her things mixed with his felt like...like when he was working at the forge. That moment when the prep work was behind him and he could see the shape of the finished product, could glimpse how it was going to turn out.

A sour taste filled his mouth. Feeling that way while shaping metal was one thing. Feeling that way about Darcy was another.

He pulled back the shower curtain and was promptly slammed by Torture Round Two—the travel bottles holding her hair stuff, a tube of bodywash, a little pink puffy thing for scrubbing. He picked it up and inhaled, filling himself with the smell of ginger and flowers, the scents he associated with Darcy. All he could imagine was squeezing more of the gel onto the puff, running it down her arms and the curve of her back, swooping it forward and dragging it in a slow, straight line from the hollow of her neck to between her breasts, swirling it around her belly button, sliding it lower, one centimeter at a time until it slipped between her legs and she pressed her naked, wet self against him and he let the puff drop to the shower floor as he fitted her against him and—

Oh,
shit
.

So much for the shower giving him some relief.

He turned on the water and hopped beneath the spray, deliberately keeping it a few degrees cooler than he would have preferred. Hey, it couldn’t hurt. A few swipes with a rough washcloth and the generic bar soap Moxie had stocked since he was a kid helped to banish the most blatant sign of his fantasizing. Of course, those thoughts didn’t vanish completely, but at least they were pushed down to a sublevel.

He could manage that.

Then he stepped out of the shower, wrapped a towel around his waist—because, like an idiot, he’d forgotten to bring his clothes in with him—and opened the door to find Darcy standing there. As if she’d been waiting for him.

And the buttons on the top of her nightgown were all undone.

* * *

S
HE HADN’T EXPECTED
him to be naked.

Okay, technically, a towel covered the major bits.

She had seen Ian in nothing but shorts or a bathing suit a number of times, but there was a major difference between seeing all that skin when she had vowed to ignore it, and seeing it now. Now, with water droplets clinging to the smattering of hair on his chest. Now, with her breath stuck in her throat and her heart hammering and sweet heat coiling deep and low. Now, when she had given herself permission to toss this one bit of her world into the air and see where it landed.

He spoke first. Good thing, because the connection between her mind and her body seemed to be misfiring.

“Sorry. I should have taken my stuff in with me.”

And deprive her of this view?

“Don’t worry. I was just wondering...”

She was pretty sure the towel twitched. “Wondering?”

“Wondering...” She inched forward, pushing the words out before she could turn and run. “Wondering how it would feel to kiss you without an audience.”