His Surprise Son (10 page)

Izzy had been entertaining fantasies that Rick was going to be her father, but no way had she been about to say that and incur Felicia’s ridicule. So she’d taken the sandwiches outside, walked far away from the trailer and set the food out for any animals who might not mind Rick’s offering. Then she’d sobbed until she’d thought she was going to throw up. She’d been twelve at the time.

By fifteen, she’d decided she was done with feeling so much. A coldness had seeped into her bones, and she’d welcomed it. After a while, it had seemed nothing could touch her. A perfect sunrise, a thoughtful gesture, Felicia’s cruelty—it had all become the same to her. And then...

“I realized I was dying of thirst in the desert, and Nate became my rain.” She gave the top of Latke’s head a gentle kiss, more soothing to her than to the dog. “Yesterday, on the river, I felt that way again. With everything I have now, everyone I love, there was still a moment when I remembered what it used to be like, and...” Giving Latke a tight hug, she admitted, “I wanted Nate as badly as I wanted him before.”

She looked again at the trailer. Broken, corroded.

It was hard to be courageous when you were continuously trying to fix the broken parts of you. With that thought, an odd, blanketing peace settled around her. Maybe she didn’t have to do that anymore. Maybe she was already as fixed as she was going to get, and the broken bits that were left were there simply to remind her she was human.

Suddenly, she knew what she had to do.

“Come on, pancake baby. “It’s time to go back to the present.”

Chapter Ten

I
zzy sneaked up the staff-only staircase of the Eagle’s Crest Inn so that no one she knew would see her going inside Nate’s room. She knew now that they would never be more than friends. She planned to tell him tonight that he had a son, and there was no way she was going to carry on an affair or a fling or even a flirtation with her teenage son’s father, to whom she had been neither married nor engaged. This was not
The Gilmore Girls
. She needed to let go of the resentment, the hope, the longing, and start sort-of-over again with Nate. They needed to be teammates, players on Team Eli.

She didn’t have much time, either, to make progress: Eli would be home from camp in a few days.

Screwing up her courage, she raised her fist and knocked on the door. Three rapid taps with her knuckles. Then she waited. Nothing. It was after nine in the evening. There was precious little to do at this hour in Thunder Ridge unless Nate was frequenting bars these days, or perhaps the twenty-four-hour Laundromat.

She had raised her hand to knock again just as the floor creaked. She glanced to her right.

Nate was walking down the carpeted hallway, looking right at her. He did not appear friendly.

“Hi,” she said, hand lowering to her side.

He said nothing, just kept walking until he was in front of her, and she had to hop out of the way while he tucked a book under his left arm and opened his door with a card. The door remained open after he entered his bedroom suite, and Izzy had a pretty clear view of what appeared to be a studio-style apartment, with a queen-size bed, a kitchenette to the left with a small table with two chairs. A desk was placed beneath the window that overlooked the street.

Tossing his book onto the table, Nate went to the refrigerator and pulled out a bottle of water, which he opened and chugged, still with his back to her. “I assume you’re here to see me,” he said, replacing the bottle and shutting the refrigerator door.

Uh-oh.
No more Mr. Nice Nate.

“Yes. I thought if you had time to talk, I’d like to. Talk.” His demeanor was no help to her nerves, and she felt the urge to hyper-babble. Resisting the urge to speak, she waited through the difficult silence.

Opening a cabinet in the surprisingly spacious kitchen, Nate pulled out a plate, then grabbed a bag from the top of the fridge and withdrew four large cookies. Setting the dish in the center of the table, he lowered himself to a chair, nodding to the one opposite his. “Have a seat.”

“All right, if you’re sure.”

“I’m not. But you’re here.”

Wow.
This was a different Nate altogether than she had ever seen before. He looked the same, dressed in black denims and a sky blue polo shirt that enhanced his eyes and clung handsomely to his shoulders, chest and muscular arms. But his features looked as if they’d been carved from granite.

Izzy approached the table, pulled out the chair he’d indicated and sat. She’d dressed in a flowy, rose-colored skirt and lace-edged white tank top, thinking the ensemble made her seem approachable. The fashion equivalent of a white flag.

“You’re probably wondering why I’m here.”

“I’m wondering how I didn’t see you in the lobby.”

“Oh. There’s a back staircase for the staff.”

“You work here?”

“No. The Pickle Jar delivers take-out meals when someone phones from the inn. We leave our menus in the rooms, and—”

“I saw. Were you delivering a meal this evening?”

“No.”

“You didn’t want to be seen visiting me?”

“No,” she said honestly, “I didn’t want to be seen visiting you. Back when we were dating, I didn’t know that many people, and they didn’t know me. Now I’m kind of a fixture around town. I manage a local business, and—”

Oh, crap, she’d almost said,
I’m on the PTA
. That revelation had to wait a bit longer. “I’m pretty active in community work.”

“And being seen with me would affect you...how?”

“I love Thunder Ridge.”

His eyebrows rose. He remembered how desperate she’d once been to leave.

“I do love it here,” she insisted. “It took leaving and coming back for me to appreciate that I can have all I want right here. I look at Thunder Ridge as my permanent home.”

“No plans to leave again?”

“Nope.”

He nudged the plate of chocolate chip cookies closer to her. “Help yourself.”

She reached for one to give her hands something to do. “Thanks.”

“I’d have gotten peanut butter if I’d known you were coming over.”

He remembered that, too.
“This is great. Fine. I like these.”

“So, go on,” he said. “You were telling me why you don’t want anyone to see you with me.”

“It’s not that. I just don’t see the point in encouraging gossip. This town has changed over the years, but in some ways it’s as small as it ever was. And...” She fumbled a bit. “I’m hoping we can get to know each other again without prying eyes.”

Perspiration broke out in a fine sheen on her face, which she was sure was turning bright red. After their fight at the river, he could reject her utterly. Leaning back in his chair, legs outstretched, he watched. And waited.

“I want to apologize to you for the judgments I made when we were younger. And for the judgments I made more recently, because, let’s face it, it’s not as if I ever stopped judging you.”

His left eyebrow rose.

“Except now,” she hastened to add. “I’m stopping now. You’re right that we were both kids making adult decisions. It was an incredibly difficult time, and we ended badly.” Izzy took a steadying breath. So far, she felt hot and prickly instead of relieved, but she was determined to finish. “I hope we can end that chapter in our lives and begin a new chapter as...as friends.”

Nate was still frowning.

“Maybe,” she amended, “
friends
isn’t quite the right word.
Acquaintances.
We can be good acquaintances.” His eyes narrowed. “Or...people,” she tried again. “Good people who...know each other.”

Note to self: Should your current job end, do not consider a career in communications. Of any kind.

Nate took a bite of his cookie, considering her while he chewed. After a pregnant pause, the awkwardness of which was rivaled only by her entire three years of high school, he said, “You don’t like chocolate chip cookies.”

“Pardon?”

He gestured to the one untasted in her hand. “You never did like them. If we’re going to be ‘good acquaintances,’ you need to tell me what you’re really thinking.”

Izzy searched for a spark of humor in his flinty eyes. “All right.”

“If we move from acquaintanceship to actually being friends, I’ll buy peanut butter cookies.”

“Really?”

“Yes. I would do that for a friend.”

“That’s nice of you. Would that be the sandwich kind? With the peanut buttery filling?”

“Those are gross.”

“It’s what I like.”

“All right, then.” He licked a few crumbs from his fingers, then noted, “You never used to tell me what you wanted.”

“I didn’t?”

“No. You ate dozens of my famous home-baked chocolate chip cookies before you ever hinted that you preferred peanut butter.”

“Well, who doesn’t like famous home-baked chocolate chip cookies?”

“You. You like peanut butter with gross peanut buttery filling, so that’s what you should have.”

“Doesn’t happiness come from being content with what you have rather than believing you should have everything you want?”

“Of course. But the key word is
everything
. No one gets everything he wants, but you’ve got to believe you’re worth at least some of what you want.”

“Is there anything you’ve wanted that you haven’t gotten?”

He looked at her quizzically. “Are you serious?”

“Yes. You wanted to be an architect, and you are. You wanted to live in a big, exciting city, and you do. What didn’t you get?”

“I was married for five years. As hard as we tried, we couldn’t make it work.” He didn’t have to say he considered that a failure—she could read it in his eyes.

“What happened?” Though she wasn’t entirely certain she wanted to know, Izzy couldn’t keep the question from popping out.

“Julianne is a great woman. An interior decorator with a successful career of her own. She’s smart, beautiful, giving to her friends. And to me.”

I am so sorry I asked.

“I like to think I was a good husband, too. That made it all the more confusing when we both realized we weren’t happy. On paper, our marriage should have worked. Our
lives
should have worked.” He shook his head. “It’s true that no one has it all, but when you realize you don’t feel...whole...then you know you have to make a change.”

“Are you the one who wanted the divorce?”

“She asked, but I knew I shouldn’t fight it. Julianne was looking for what she called ‘a more authentic life.’”

“What does that mean?”

“I think it means she wanted to feel that she was where she was supposed to be. After our divorce was final, she compared her life to a three-course meal and said she was still waiting for the entrée. Obviously, she didn’t think it was ever going to arrive if she stayed with me.’”

Ouch. Izzy winced on his behalf. “But how do you
know
you couldn’t have made it happen, made that feeling come, if you’d stayed together? How does she even know that what she wants actually exists?”

Nate smiled. “When you walked in tonight, I had no idea we’d be having this kind of conversation. Did you?”

“No.” A smile played around Izzy’s lips, also. “Am I being too personal?”

“Nope.” He leaned forward, forearms resting on his knees. There seemed to be an invisible beam connecting their gazes. “I can’t speak for Julianne, but I think we got married in the first place hoping the feeling of emptiness would go away. This didn’t go over so well the last time I told you, but I felt whole for the first time that summer before college. There was nothing I wanted, nothing I needed that I didn’t already have. There was nobody I had to become.”

“Don’t you think that was because you’d already gotten into college? All your wheels were on the right track.”

Nate shook his head. “It had nothing to do with that. I’d spent four years of high school ‘on track’ and never feeling like I could stop moving or striving toward something. It took me a long time to realize—longer than it should have—that I felt whole for the first time in my life that summer. Because of you.”

Wow. That’s almost as good as “you complete me.”

Nate was going to make it hard to keep her wits about her if he said things like that.

“That was really only true over the summer, though. Don’t you think?” she asked, determined to keep their relationship in perspective. “After I found out I was pregnant, I
did
hope that you would change. I wanted you to say you were ready to become a father.”
And a husband.

“You wanted to keep the baby.”

Getting warmer. “Yes. I said I agreed to the adoption plan, but it wasn’t what I wanted. It made sense. Of course it did. We were so young and had no way to support ourselves and a child, like you said. But I’d never had a family, not really. I didn’t know what a mother’s love felt like. I couldn’t imagine not taking care of my baby. I wanted someone I could love completely. Someone who needed me. It was selfish of me, I know.”

Nate’s frown deepened. Darkening to ocean blue, his eyes seemed to hide a tempest of thoughts. “It wasn’t selfish.” There were more words inside, wanting to emerge, but he lowered his head, his forehead on the heels of his palms. When he looked up again, the frown was gone, but his eyes looked older, tired. “You said you’d wished I’d changed. I wish I had, too.”

Whoa.
He wished...that he’d been ready to be a father?

Pure longing rushed like white water through Izzy’s body, over the stone around her heart, wearing it away, smoothing the rough edges.

The room pulsed with intimacy. It seemed smaller—much—than when she’d first walked in. Nate reached toward her, something she realized only when she felt him taking her hands in his and holding them. Gentle, warm, secure—his touch was all the things it used to be. Including electrifying. It was impossible not to remember in that moment that she was in his hotel room. With a bed that was bigger than anything else in the room.

They’d had sex too soon, and at first, to Izzy, it had felt like falling down a waterfall—exhilarating but frightening, with no idea at all of whether she was going to land safely or not. Once she’d given him the last bit of her heart, their lovemaking had changed to something that felt more like standing beneath the waterfall with every pore in her body dying of thirst.

And every time, he had stared at her afterward as if what they’d just shared was something rare and important. In later years, she’d wondered what it would have felt like if she’d known he loved her, too. What if every kiss, every touch, had been a promise sealing their forevers?

Nate brought his chair closer to hers. Their knees were almost touching. “I really want to kiss you.” His whisper touched every cell in her body.

Dear God, help me remember why it’s wrong...even though it sounds so, so right.

Eli. Eli. This is going to be hard on him...complicated... Don’t make it worse.

Nate moved closer. It took every ounce of strength she possessed to squeeze the big, strong hands that held hers. She squeezed tightly.
You have no idea what’s coming. You don’t need more complications, either.

“I have to go now.” The soft words echoed in the silent room. “But we need to see each other again. Get to know each other better. Very soon, please.”

His disappointment was palpable, the tension in his body traveling through his fingers. Raising her hands, he pressed his lips to the back of her knuckles—obviously the only kiss he figured she’d allow—and agreed, “Very soon.”