The Heart of the Matter (6 page)

She stopped.

“You’re a very lucky young woman.” The Kiwanis president, a handsome older woman with platinum blond hair, leaned toward Laura as the crowd applauded Jason’s speech. “Not only is he gorgeous with a body any woman would lust after, but…” She sighed wistfully. “He has a sense of humor. I’d kill for a man with a sense of humor.”

She was married, Laura knew, to a very intense investment banker.

Laura applauded, too. “We’re just friends,” she said. “He’s taking my aerobics class.”

The woman turned to her as though she were dense. “Then, make the transition to lovers before he gets away. His wife’s been gone for four years, and every single woman in town’s been waiting for some sign from him that he’s ready to date again. And he chose
you.
Don’t waste the opportunity.”

After the program, much of the group left and the rest
moved to the dance floor. The band was playing torchy big-band-era tunes, and Jason pulled Laura into his arms.

She was braced for the moment, knowing it would be significant. But even being prepared didn’t protect her from the onslaught of sensation.

His arms were strong, his movements competent if not flashy, and the scent of his aftershave was sharply herbal with just a trace of sweetness. She felt as though she could remain in his embrace for a lifetime.

It was as though her body had sighed. She found a sweet spot close to his shoulder and, with her temple against his chin, settled in for the duration. And that was the only rub. For her, the duration was never long enough.

Jason was surprised by how soft she felt in his arms. He’d seen her in stretch Lycra. He knew there wasn’t an ounce of excess flesh on her, and that her muscles were stronger than most men’s. Yet she slipped into his embrace like a cloud and for a moment felt almost as insubstantial.

Then he applied the slightest pressure to her back, she leaned into him, and he felt her breasts against his coat, her legs moving with his as they turned on the small floor.

Lust came to vivid life inside him. But he remembered the conversation he’d had with the boys about his readiness for this encounter. “This isn’t about sex,” he’d told them, “it’s about getting acquainted.” He had to remember that.

Though sexuality wasn’t as dead in him as he’d thought. It had merely been unconscious. And Laura, however innocently, was reviving it.

“Did you eat Twinkies as a kid?” he asked.

She looked first confused then amused by the question. And he noticed absently as he perused her upturned face that she had freckles on the bridge of her nose.

“Yes,” she replied. “Why?”

“Did you eat hamburgers and fries through high school?”

“Of course. Why?”

“I’m trying to figure out,” he admitted, “at what point a junk-eating teenager looks up from a plate of onion rings and decides that health and nutrition are going to be her life’s work.”

He tightened his grip on her and turned suddenly. A large man with exaggerated rumba moves, despite the bigband music, collided with his back, then bounced off and moved on.

Laura felt the collision and the protective move of Jason’s shoulder over her. She stayed within its shelter an extra moment, not because she feared the intoxicated rumba enthusiast, but because in her lonely little world, his care and attention felt so remarkable.

“Actually,” she said, choosing to be frank, “I think I was looking for something I could control. Food and exercise have a direct influence in and on your body, and it’s predictable if you’re consistent.”

He thought about that a moment. The music stopped, and he caught her hand and led her toward open French doors and a balcony that overlooked the ocean. A breeze blew, but it was mid-August warm and felt like the stirring of bath water.

He leaned a hip on the balcony railing and leaned back against a pillar as she looked out at the moonlight on the ocean. “That suggests there were other things in your life you
couldn’t
control,” he said.

She explained briefly about her parents and their eventual divorce. “My father stopped wanting to see me, and my mother changed into someone else—bitter and angry. I wasted a lot of time wanting the old life back. When I
finally realized it wasn’t going to happen, I decided to rebuild a life for myself in which I took complete control.” She sighed and smiled. “Did you know that food is one of the few things in life over which we have any control?”

He smiled wryly. “Unless you’re me, then there is nothing in your life over which you have control.”

She dismissed his denial with a wave of her hand. “Nonsense. Your life seems to be full of all sorts of difficult elements, and yet you seem to have all of it well in hand. Kids who seem to adore you and are very happy, friends who think a lot of you, a reading public that thinks you’re brilliant. You have everything—even if it doesn’t feel like you have control of it.”

“Well.” With him sitting and her standing, he had to look a little way up into her eyes. “You’ve only seen the daytime me,” he said quietly, seriously. “You have to see me wandering around in the middle of the night with a glass of bourbon because I can’t sleep, because although I appear to have everything a man could want, I don’t have…”

“Lucy,” she supplied, her own voice quiet, grave.

He knew that wasn’t precisely it anymore. He’d mulled it over that night in the hot tub when he’d thought he was mad at her for making him think about the past, then realized he was mad at himself for not seeing the present.

“She was beautiful, wonderful…remarkable,” he said with all the sincerity with which that truth would live with him forever. Then he sighed, accepting another truth. “But she’s gone. No matter how desperately I’ve wished her back—like your parents’ reconciliation—it isn’t going to happen. So I have to.start again.”

She turned to sit on the railing, but he caught her arm
and pulled her in between his knees instead. He looped his arms around her waist and pulled her in closer.

She didn’t resist but rested her hands on his arms.

“So, are you looking for a man you can control, as well?” he asked lightly. “I’m not sure how many of those you’ll find.”

She smiled. There was a bright pool of light near the French doors, but the railing was in shadow and he could see the brightness of her eyes and the smooth ivory of her skin. Even as close to him as she was, the little black dress made the rest of her disappear into darkness.

Though he could feel her unconscious inclination against the inside of his leg, and had to fight that distraction to hear her reply.

“Only in so far as he’d be faithful,” she said. “That seems to be a problem for me. I’ve had a few relationships I thought were going well only to discover they were going even better—and in other directions—for the men.”

He couldn’t imagine a man ever holding her this close and being able to think about another woman. She seemed to fill his mind, his sensory awareness.

“Then you didn’t want them, anyway,” he said. “They were obviously inferior.”

“Are you sure?” The wind ruffled her bangs, and it must have ruffled his hair as well because her hand went to it. He felt the gentle smoothing gesture down to the marrow of his bones. “My experience seems to indicate that all men are unfaithful. Or, at least, most men.”

He pulled her closer. He saw uncertainty flicker in her eyes for an instant, then she looped her arms around his neck.

“You haven’t experienced me,” he said softly, drawing her closer still. “I’m as faithful as the day is long.”

Laura felt just an instant’s panic. She wanted desperately
for him to kiss her, but it was going to change everything. She was sure of it. This easy little friendship would change into something underlined by sex and overseen by expectation—two serious relationship busters.

Then he stood and opened his mouth over hers, and she realized that she wasn’t as afraid it wouldn’t work between them as she was reluctant to risk the possibility that it would.

But it was already too late. The instant he took confident and possessive control of the kiss, the cautious friendship was gone. What they shared was already something else, metamorphosing second by second as he dipped his tongue inside her mouth, crushed her to him as she responded, lifted her off the balcony floor in his embrace and finally drew his head back, obviously as shaken as she was.

She wanted to scream, laugh, cry, run. Any one of those choices seemed appropriate, except that she couldn’t seem to move. That kiss had taken the control she’d carefully forced over a lifetime and rattled it until her teeth shook.

“Jason!” she whispered, a pleat forming between her eyebrows. “I don’t…I can’t…oh, hell.”

She pushed out of his arms, stared at him for a moment as though she resented him for something, then ran through the shadows to the light from the French doors and disappeared inside the hotel dining room. Jason thought that
don’t, can’t,
and
hell
were three words a man usually didn’t want to hear when he was kissing a woman. And she’d pelted him with all three. That didn’t bode well for what he was beginning to feel for Laura Price.

He found her in the parking lot, leaning against the front fender of his Mercedes, a hand to her diaphragm as she dragged in air.

“You know,” he said, leaning beside her against the
car, “maybe we should talk about your being faithful. You just ran away from me.”

She gave him an apologetic side glance. “You scared me.”

“Sorry,” he said. “I’ve been celibate a long time.”

She gave his shoulder a healthy smack. “That’s not what I mean. I mean…we’re not going to be dealing with fluffy kid stuff here.”

He shrugged a shoulder, then dramatically rubbed where she’d punched him. “You may be deliciously taut and firm in a leotard, but I’m not a kid. Is that what you want? Kid stuff?”

“Of course not.” She sighed. “Maybe I’ve just never felt the power of…something that wasn’t. It’s a little daunting.”

“It’s very daunting. That’s why it took me this long to decide that I could do it again.” He straightened away from the car. “Come on. I’ll take you home.”

And that was how he left it—no promise to call, no suggestion that she call him if and when she was ready.

She gave him a chaste kiss good-night in the condo’s hallway, apparently appreciating his silence, then ran up the steps and disappeared.

He drove home curiously numb, thinking how strange his life had become. The first time he’d fallen in love, they’d both been attracted, and—he saw now—they’d both been fearless. Love had grown, thrived, borne fruit, always looked ahead.

It was going to be harder this time. Age and experience brought caution. If there was only himself at risk, he might push this to see what happened. To show her that major league love had it all over the kid stuff-warts and all.

He pulled into the garage and crept quietly into the
kitchen-not at all surprised to find Adam sitting up, watching Leno, a turkey sandwich in hand.

“How’d it go?” he asked, turning off the television and following him into the kitchen. “I made the coffee.”

Jason hooked an arm around the boy’s neck and held him there while he poured a cup. It smelled brisk and strong, and somehow the homeyness of coffee warming and his firstborn beside him stabilized his emotions.

“It went well,” he said. He traded Adam the cup for a bite of the sandwich. “We ate, I gave a brilliant speech, then we danced.”

Adam sipped at the cup, then handed it back when Jason returned his sandwich. “And
that
went well?” he asked in surprise.

Jason frowned at him. “Have faith in your old man, Adam. I was quite the charmer in my day.”

“Yeah, but do we want to think about how long ago that was? Did you.you know.kiss her?”

Jason walked him to his room. “We’ve talked about this. Gentlemen don’t.”

“I know, guys don’t talk about their exploits. But you’re my dad. I’m your live-in son. I have a comfortable future at risk here if you get married again.”

Jason laughed, lowering his voice as they passed Eric’s and Matt’s rooms. “This was only a first date, Adam. But, yes, I kissed her.”

Adam stopped at the doorway to his room, clearly astonished. “And?”

“And it was very nice.”

“Did she think so?”

Jason was convinced she had and that that was most of her problem. “Yes, I’m pretty sure she did.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah. Get to bed, it’s late. And thanks for making the coffee.”

“Sure. Oh, Dad?” Adam caught his arm. “Aunt Patsy called, and she and Nickie are going to Boston to find Nickie an apartment before she goes back to college. She wants to know if they can visit for a few days since we didn’t get to Lawrence for the Fourth of July. She said she’ll call you on her cell phone in the morning on the way.”

“Okay.” Jason pulled Adam into his arm and hugged him. “Sleep tight.”

Adam opened his door, then stopped and pointed to Matt’s room. “Dufus really did. Went right to sleep on his Power Rangers sheets. I had to check for monsters, but once I told him the room was clear, I didn’t hear one whine out of him.”

Jason nodded. That had been a clever gift on Laura’s part. It occurred to him that it was easy to identify the fears in someone else and miss your own entirely.

He wandered back toward the kitchen, thinking it was probably going to be a sleepless night and he’d be able to get a column or two ahead.

Women should come into a man’s life with instructions designed for those accustomed to visual aids and replays. And with an interpreter, as well, because even if a woman states her case twice, it doesn’t mean you’ll understand it.

—“Warfield’s Battles”

“
S
o…we’ve been…walking for…for almost an hour.” Dixie swallowed and gulped in air. “And you haven’t…told me…how it went.”

“It went fine.” Laura felt the comfort of her properly fed muscles moving in concert with her strong bones and oxygenated blood and waited for the endorphin rush that came with it. It happened without fail. She’d been eating right and exercising so long that her body moved like a well-tended machine, and she swore there were days when she could feel every part in perfect harmony with every other.

“Fine? All I’m getting…is fine. I’m power-walking with you…at 7:00 a.m. on a Sunday morning while…pushing a twenty-three-pound baby…in a stroller…and…all I’m getting is…fine?” Dixie stopped, breathing
heavily. “I want more than…that…or I’m leaving you.my baby and going to Dunkin’ Donuts.”

Laura ran lightly in place. “That’s no threat,” she said, grinning as she smiled down at the baby and it giggled up at her. “Sammie and I love each other, and if you
do
scarf a dozen doughnuts, you’ll be so penitent and regretful in class tomorrow night that you won’t even groan while I work you to death.”

Dixie sighed in defeat. “All right. Then, take pity on me because I’m nosy.” She began to push the stroller again.

Laura walked in step with her. “Okay, we had a great time,” she said, pumping her arms. She blamed Dixie’s slower pace and incessant questions for the fact that she couldn’t concentrate on her exercise this morning. But the truth was that her mind was too cluttered with fears, longings, recriminations and memories for her to abandon herself to the demands of her body. “Jason Warfield is very charming company.”

“What did you do?”

“Well…it was a dinner.”

Dixie shook her head pityingly. “Please don’t recite the menu. What did you
do?”

Laura unknotted the sweater tied at her waist and pulled it on. The breeze from the ocean had a little early morning bite to it. “His speech was funny,” she said, sidestepping the more personal stuff, “and I met a few people from Boston who are summering here.”

Dixie obviously wasn’t satisfied.

“We danced,” Laura added, unable to prevent a little smile as she remembered how nice that had been. She could recall clearly the moment she’d stepped into his arms and how right it had felt. If she concentrated, she
could still feel his arms around her. “He’s a good dancer. Not…showy, you know, but…nice.”

Dixie stopped at a stone bench in the wall that bowed out into the sand at the end of Farnham’s quiet main street. In another few hours it would be filled with tourists, bicycles, kites and dogs, but now it was still—just a breeze blowing colorful wind socks, banners and awnings.

“When did he kiss you?” Dixie asked. She turned the toddler toward the street so that she could watch the colorful flutter.

Laura suddenly lost all heart for resistance. She told Dixie everything she thought and felt, how she’d lain awake reliving every moment of the evening and seeing Jason’s image in her mind’s eye when he said goodbye.

He’d smiled warmly, told her he’d enjoyed her company, but he’d said nothing about seeing her again.

“Well,” Dixie said practically, “you ran away from him in the middle of a kiss!”

“Only because it was so…powerful. Everything inside me was shaking. My mind was all muddled. I couldn’t think, I couldn’t…figure it out.”

“Why do you have to?”

“Because it’s my life!” Laura said impatiently, getting to her feet and turning to the ocean, one knee on the bench as she leaned against the wall. “I’ve only known him a few weeks, I’ve only seen him a handful of times, but the minute he took me in his arms I knew…” She hesitated and heaved a sigh. “I knew he was going to change everything.”

Sammie fussed, and Dixie handed her a bag of raisins. “What
everything?
He’s going to change your lonely life of work and exercise? Is that a bad thing?”

Laura frowned at her. “I like my lonely little life.”

Dixie made a scornful sound. “No, you don’t. You pretend
to because you built it yourself. But deep down, you want what I have.”

Laura repeated the scornful sound. “Three children under seven, sleepless nights and never a moment to call my own?”

“A man who loves you,” Dixie corrected her gravely. “A man who’ll give you his children. A man who’ii stay.”

“He already has children.”

“Then, so will you. Maybe he’ll give you more.”

Laura sat down again, accepting that everything Dixie said was true. She did want all those things. She just didn’t trust anyone to give them to her.

“He loved his wife very much,” she said. “He said she was…’beautiful,’“ she quoted. “‘Wonderful. Remarkable.”‘

“Then, he’ll want another happy marriage. It’s statistical.”

“But I’m…” Laura groped for the right word. Selfanalysis was difficult. “Opinionated, a little stiff, a little.demanding of the people in my life.”

“Yes, you are,” Dixie agreed with an affectionate smile that took the sting out of it. “You’ll have to work on that. I know that generally you’re not one to compromise what you believe, but in this case—dealing with men and children—the simple truth is that a lot of compromise is required on a woman’s part. But it reaps many benefits. Not right away. And not always in great amounts. But it does insidiously wonderful things to your life that you’ll find you can’t live without.” She stood, adjusting the baby’s hat. Then she looked Laura in the eye. “I think you should go visit him and tell him you want another shot at that kiss.”

“That’s crazy.” Laura stood, too, digging into her fanny pack for car keys.

“Love is fueled by craziness. Want to stop for coffee and a doughnut?”

“Just coffee.”

“Did I mention that you’re uncompromising?”

Free of afternoon appointments the following day, Laura left the office early and spent several hours making a carrot cake for Jason’s boys. Dixie
was crazy.
She couldn’t possibly ask Jason to try the kiss again, but she could visit him on the pretext of bringing a healthy dessert to the boys and hope that he brought up the subject of last night so she could then tell him that panic had accounted for her behavior, and in the light of day she saw things more clearly and was more hopeful than frightened by what might develop between them.

She stared at the finished cake for fifteen minutes as she considered the possibility that he would tell her to take her cake and give it to someone who was willing to deal with the kind of paranoia from which she suffered.

She covered the cake with plastic wrap, placed it in a flat box on the passenger seat of her car and decided that rejection was probably preferable to the regret she would feel if she didn’t try.

She drove across the small town to the highway that paralleled the ocean, then took the turn that led up the hill to the exclusive community where Jason lived.

She was half a block away from his house and rehearsing what she would say when she saw the blondes. They stepped out of a little green MG that had just pulled into the driveway when Jason walked out his front door, arms open.

One of the blondes was a little taller than the other and
wore her hair straight and loose. It flew out behind her like a banner as she ran into his arms, tanned legs in small white shorts flashing.

The other blonde, rounder, more voluptuous, with her hair piled in a loose knot atop her head but with the same great legs in khaki shorts also hurried into his embrace. He picked them both up off the walk, and all three laughed and hugged as though they had delicious things planned for the balance of the afternoon.

Laura felt a stabbing pain to her midsection. Fury simmered in bitter disappointment inside her as she watched Jason and the blondes disappear into the house.

By the time she backed into the nearest driveway and headed back down the hill, self-recrimination was added to the fury and disappointment and she had a serious stew under way.

She was not at all surprised when Jason missed that night’s class. Well, she told herself as she worked her students hard, what else did she expect? She’d left him with the impression that she was afraid of a relationship with him, and he, being a man and true to the species as she knew it, didn’t bother grieving over her or expending energy trying to cajole her into giving it a try. He simply moved on—and in rare form, apparently.

She’d known how it would all turn out in the beginning; she’d just let herself be deluded by his exceptional charm, by his beautiful children, and by a lifetime of wishing desperately that there was something other than what she had.

She came to terms with it in her head. She simply couldn’t accept it in her heart. And that was the trouble, she knew. A few thin weeks in his company and she was already thinking emotionally rather than logically. Jason
had poisoned her with his brown eyes and his gentle touch.

By Wednesday evening, her stew of self-recrimination, anger and disappointment had fermented and was bubbling away inside her. All attempts to reason herself out of what she felt had failed. So she was living with it, but not well.

When she started the warm-up routine and saw Jason come loping through the doors at the last minute to take his place beside Philly with a smiling greeting, her pot of fermenting stew began to boil over.

It propelled her with more force than complex carbohydrates. She picked the hardest routines, ran them longer and ignored the concerned glances from her students. Jason and Philly leaned against each other in laughing exhaustion during the brief break before she went to the floor work.

That spurred her on to even more merciless measures, completely oblivious to the strain and pain herself as she again chose the upper body side lifts everyone hated, added more push-ups to an already grueling routine and more reps to the leg lifts that had everyone groaning before they’d even started.

By cool-down, two students had left, two were lying on their backs on their mats, panting, and the others were only halfhearted in their efforts to follow her.

Two of the students were glaring at her. One was Dixie. The other was Jason.

Everyone wandered off dispiritedly when she’d finished, apparently too weak to applaud themselves. Laura disappeared into the bathroom backstage where she sometimes changed when she was going out after class, and simply hid out until everyone was gone.

She was doing it because she didn’t want to explode, she told herself. It wasn’t cowardice, it was…discretion.

Ten minutes later Laura opened the door, sure everyone would be gone. Most of her students hurried home to families immediately after class, propelled by the guilt of having left them for the hour’s exercise. Even Dixie, who logged the day’s receipts for her, never stayed beyond tallying up the cash box. She always left it on the edge of the stage.

Laura went to pick it up and gather up her purse and bag.

She stopped abruptly, her heart lurching at the sight of Jason sitting cross-legged beside it. He’d changed into a fresh shirt as he always did after class, and the plain black T seemed to further darken his already black-brown eyes.

“Yes?” she asked stiffly, picking up the cash box and stuffing it into her athletic bag.

Out of the corner of her eye she saw him unfold gracefully to his feet. Only three classes, she thought absently, and his movements were already more fluid.

“It wasn’t hard to see that something was bothering you tonight,” he said quietly, his voice also a little stiff. “I wanted to know if it had anything to do with us.”

“Us?” She pushed the table that held her tape player and tapes back into the wings and tossed her bag and purse onto the auditorium floor. She spoke calmly despite the fermented stew boiling over inside her. “There is no us.”

She leapt off the stage.

Jason leapt also and landed a little ahead of her to prevent her escape. He caught her arm in a gentle grip. His eyes studied hers, obviously trying to read what was on her mind. She thought that amazing. Of course, he didn’t know she’d seen the blondes.

“So, that’s official, then?” he asked evenly. “I got the impression you were more concerned that a relationship between us might be too good rather than too bad, and that you were going to think it over.”

She pulled away from him and picked up her bag and purse. “I did think it over,” she said, a tinge of sadness reflected in the anger in her voice.

He let her walk past him without stopping her. That surprised her. Then, as she headed for the door, he said, “I can’t believe you couldn’t see the possibilities.”

That stopped her cold. Sadness fled and all she felt was the anger—full and hot, exuding from her pores. She turned and marched back to him, the bad stew exploding.

“I saw the possibilities, Jason,” she said when she had reached him, straining up in a nose-to-nose, in-your-face offensive. “But I imagined they existed between you and me and not between you and a couple of blondes. Or is that
among
you and the blondes because blondes is
plural!”

He shifted his weight, looking puzzled.

“Oh, please,” she said. “I know we don’t owe each other anything, and I know I probably left you with the impression that I…didn’t know what I wanted.” What had begun angrily was now more about disappointment. “It was because I cared and because I know my limitations! I didn’t want to rush into anything and end up hurting you. But you apparently experienced no such confusion. You knew quite clearly that if I wasn’t available, anyone else would do. It did take two, though, didn’t it? Does that mean I was difficult to replace, or that, unlike me, you have no limitations?”

Something flamed in his eyes, and she got a strong and sudden impression that she was in trouble. He jammed his hands in his pockets—another indicator.

“You were watching me?” he asked, his voice dangerously quiet.