The Time of Her Life (19 page)

The feeling was so comfortable, so recognizable, an
almost-overwhelming sense of need—the same way he’d felt last night when he
hadn’t been able to keep his hands off her. Not when it would have meant letting
this feeling slip away.

The familiarity had nothing to do with the cottage. He never
slept here. Why would he when he had a house to himself?

But as he held Susanna and watched the fading night chase the
shadows from the bedroom, he realized this familiarity wasn’t so much Susanna
but the very act of
feeling.

He hadn’t in such a long time.

When had he died? It had happened so slowly, so subtly, he
couldn’t even remember, just one morning, possibly a morning like this one, he
simply didn’t wake up. Life at The Arbors had finally sucked him dry. Or maybe
loss had done the deed. Losing everyone, one at a time—even losing his brother
to the Marines—until he was the only man standing.

But not alive. He knew the difference, could feel the
difference, knew he’d died a slow death that mirrored Alzheimer’s, seconds
ticking away until eventually awareness simply wasn’t there anymore.

He hadn’t known.

Not until this morning when he’d awakened in Susanna’s arms
after a night of coming back to life.

Jay had no idea how long he lay there, realizing,
feeling,
but by the time Susanna stirred against him,
the sun was bright beyond the windows.

He sensed the moment she became aware. One moment she was
molded against him, a smooth-skinned extension of him, and the next she was
simply lying close, still touching but separate. As if awareness had come
invisibly between them.

She didn’t open her eyes although he knew she was awake. Maybe,
like him, she wasn’t eager to give up this feeling, didn’t want reality to
intrude on this warm contentment.

Her lashes finally fluttered, and she opened her eyes. Their
gazes met, but there was no room for words in the quiet, at least not any words
he wanted to hear. He could see reality in those deep blue eyes, wasn’t
surprised when she finally whispered, “This wasn’t smart, Jay. There’s no place
for us to go.”

“I know.”

He pulled her closer, as if he could physically bridge the
distance reality had created between them, bring back that feeling of
oneness.

She exhaled a soft sigh, and her eyes fluttered shut again, her
expression dreamy and still soft from sleep.

And contentment.

He saw that in her expression, too.

And guessed it had been a long time since she’d felt this way,
as well. Since her husband died?

“We’re just going to make a big mess.”

“I know.”

But he lowered his mouth and caught hers gently, tasting the
morning on her lips, discovering that the arousal of the previous night had been
as potent as he remembered, and he didn’t care about anything except not losing
this feeling again.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

J
AY
FINISHED
CHOPPING
garlic then
pressed the knife blade on the fragrant chunks to release the flavor. He sensed
Susanna’s gaze on him.

He turned to find her watching him. “What?”

“You are a man of many talents, Jay.” Dropping a freshly washed
spoon into the drain board, she smiled then leaned down to rub Butters’s
head.

Gatsby wanted in on the action and they wound up with both dogs
crowding the limited space in the kitchen.

Jay shooed them out again. “Go, beasts. Settle down.”

Then when Susanna slipped her hands into the sink again to wash
away the dog fur, he said, “I’m trying to impress you. Sounds like it’s
working.”

“Definitely. Cooking is unexpected, I must admit. I can’t think
of anything you’re not good at.”

After drying her hands, she came up behind him and slipped her
arms around his waist, pressing close. “Running The Arbors. Taking care of
everyone around you. Fixing broken pipes. Cooking delicious meals.”

“Sex. You forgot sex.”

Pressing a kiss to his shoulder, she exhaled a breath
penetrating the flannel shirt in a burst of warmth against his skin and sent the
blood skittering to his crotch.

“No. You’re not good at sex,” she whispered. “You excel at sex.
Different list.” She tightened her grip around his waist and rubbed her cheek
against him to emphasize the point.

Leaning into her, Jay savored the familiar feel of her against
him. “That was the right answer, so you can eat.”

“Good, because I’m starving.”

“Good, because we’re making enough food here to feed half the
nursing center. Think we should pack some up and bring it to third-shift staff?”
He brushed the garlic off the cutting board into the skillet and left it to
brown in simmering olive oil.

“Good idea. They don’t ever get the goodies Liz puts out during
the day. Not fresh at least.” Susanna released him, leaving a cool emptiness
where she’d been, and went to the vegetable basket hanging beside the baker’s
rack.

“Speaking of feeding the multitudes.” She handled a few peppers
and onions and then chose one of each. A woman who knew her vegetables and
understood that appearances could be deceiving. Jay liked that about her.

“I should shop for an air mattress this weekend,” she said.
“Where’s a good place to find one?”

“Hmm. Let me think.” Jay considered the choices, liked how
she’d consulted him, and wondered if he could invite himself along on her
shopping trip.

Each day they traversed new terrain in this turn their
relationship had taken.
Playing house,
Susanna
called it, and
enjoying the moment.

This
moment
had been going on two
weeks.

Jay had definitely enjoyed every second. Susanna was easy to
play house with. As long as he didn’t get sidetracked thinking about what would
happen when the clock stopped ticking and their time together ran out.

“Got a couple of bedding warehouses that might have a good
selection and decent prices. Then there’s always Walmart.”

“Good idea. I should probably check online so I don’t wind up
running around for something I don’t want. Brandon won’t mind sleeping on the
couch, but he’ll be here for nearly two weeks. I want him to be
comfortable.”

She was being a good mom. A nurturer, Gerald had called her.
Jay liked that about her, too.

“Where’s this air mattress going? The office?”

“Where else? Brooke can sleep with me.”

She sounded so matter-of-fact Jay knew she must have been
debating the decision for a while. He was getting the hang of Susanna, the more
intimately he got to know her. The more uncertain she was, the more no-nonsense
she got. He hadn’t realized that about her before.

“Will your daughter keep my spot warm?”

“I suppose.” The response was noncommittal but the mention of
their sleeping arrangements sent color into her cheeks.

For as no-nonsense as Susanna could be, she blushed so easily.
Jay found all it took was a well-placed word about their relationship to get a
response.

In the darkness of her bed, where they’d done most of their
getting to know each other, she’d shared a lot about her life. She’d married
young and hadn’t done much actual dating before her husband. So the sum total of
her experience with men wasn’t a whole lot.

Funny, how he was the one who hadn’t left his family home, but
he had a lot more experience dating than this caring woman who’d experienced so
many of the things in life he wanted to.

“So who all’s coming for Christmas?” he asked, then looked at
his dogs. “Besides these two greedy beggars, I mean.”

Butters and Gatsby were a given at every meal.

But Jay did wonder what her kids would be like in person. He’d
seen their photos in her office and in the cottage. Good-looking kids who looked
way too grown up to belong to Susanna. He wondered how she’d introduce him. As
her co-administrator? He supposed that worked under the circumstances.

He didn’t like the thought of being her little secret. He also
didn’t relish the idea of sacrificing two weeks when they were on a time
limit.

Of course, he’d never begrudge her a visit with her kids, not
when she was so starved to be with the people she loved. And she was. He’d come
to recognize the symptoms in the way she panicked whenever her cell phone wasn’t
within easy reach, the way she dropped everything to take a call or respond to a
text.

Connections to her life.

What was it about The Arbors that disconnected everyone from
reality? When he and Drew were younger, they’d speculated that The Arbors
resided in an atmospheric bubble that sealed them off from the real world,
protected them from natural disasters and nuclear attacks and even alien
invasions.

Jay had thought those scenarios were the product of two
imaginative brothers going through the science fiction phase of boyhood, but
there’s been some truth, after all.

No, Jay didn’t have any right at all to demand to be introduced
to her kids as anything other than a co-administrator. Not when he had nothing
more to offer than a few months of playing house.

* * *

S
USANNA
QUICKLY
DISCOVERED
that decking out The Arbors for Christmas was a
weeklong event that involved everyone. Tessa worked so hard decorating for
Thanksgiving that unlike retail stores where Christmas displays went up for
Black Friday, they were into December before the remnants of Thanksgiving
vanished.

“I don’t see the point in rushing,” Tessa told Susanna while
covering the activity room windows with sheets of white paper, creating the
backdrop to a winter scene that would dominate the entrance to the first-floor
lockdown. “I can keep Christmas until Epiphany, which is well into the new year.
That’s why I do a combo holiday theme. Then I can start taking down Christmas a
little at a time while we’re still glittery for the New Year.”

Her process made sense. No question about how labor intensive
decorating could be. Every lobby of every wing got a separate winter scene. Then
there were archways strung with lights, plus foil snowflakes hanging from
ceiling grids every three feet on every wing of every floor. There must have
been a thousand of them, all hung with painstaking care, all creating a
sparkling ambience with the facility’s lighting.

And Tessa made sure there was a display for every religion of
the residents’ demographic. Beautiful Nativity scenes showcased the Holy Family,
as well as a collection of stars of Bethlehem, ranging from artistic cut glass
to strobe lights. A festival of lights celebrated Hanukkah. Kinara centerpieces
decorated the dining room tables for Kwanzaa. Wreaths, garland, holly and
mistletoe abounded wherever one turned.

Then there were the trees.

Every corner and cubby had one. Each decorated with an
individual theme. Chester with his toolbox and ladder seemed to be everywhere
Susanna turned. And she did her part to share in the excitement, recruiting her
own team of decorating assistants to help with the trees on the ALF floors.

“What a marvelous idea,” Tessa told Susanna. “I never thought
to involve the residents, but there’s no reason not to. Not up on the ALF,
anyway.”

“They always helped decorate in New York,” Susanna explained.
“Kicked off the excitement. Dining would provide coffee and cookies and we’d
make a party of it.”

Of course, that had been in the ALF and the massive
twelve-hundred unit independent living facility, where residents didn’t require
too much supervision. Susanna kept that part to herself. Everyone around The
Arbors knew the ins and outs of protecting their charges. That was the job and
they were well trained.

Tessa also liked the party idea, and it wasn’t long before Liz
showed up with Christmas-flavored coffee and baked goods.

The only person noticeably absent from the decorating was Jay.
Somehow whenever anything needed to be hung, draped or wrapped, the man was
nowhere to be found. Then one day he vanished completely.

Susanna asked Tessa if Jay was typically missing in action
while they were outside in the cold, stringing the lights around a life-size
crèche that Tessa said had been handcrafted by Jay’s father, specifically to
decorate the facility entrance.

“Do not even talk to me about Mr. C.” Tessa waved a dismissive
hand. “He is on my list of people to kill. Number one, in fact.”

Her response didn’t invite questions, but Susanna would have
asked Jay if she could have tracked him down. No one seemed to have seen him,
and when she text-messaged him, she received no response. She tried him on the
radio, and all she got was a cryptic message, telling her he was in the middle
of something and would get back to her soon.

Soon didn’t happen by any reasonable person’s definition of the
word. But the day wore on without him, keeping her busy with the nonstop pace of
a shift change, three types of therapy and two transfers. Transfer literally
meant a resident transferring from the bed to a chair and from the chair to a
walker and using the walker to visit the bathroom without assistance. There were
a series of progressive behavioral tests, but this final test made the
determination if the resident could be released from the first-floor nursing
center and returned to the ALF. As a result, it was a bit of an emotional roller
coaster for the residents.

One passed. One didn’t.

“Yet,”
she said, explaining to Mr.
Minahan why he couldn’t rejoin his wife of sixty-five years in their third-floor
apartment. “We can try again in another few days when you’re feeling stronger
after a few more therapy sessions. In the meantime, you’re still free to go
upstairs and spend the day visiting—”

“I’m not an infant, young lady,” Mr. Minahan, normally an
easygoing man, informed her in a dull roar. “I pay a fortune to live in this
establishment. I’ll decide where I can and can’t spend the night without your
help, thank you very much.”

The exchange degenerated from there, despite Susanna’s best
efforts to assuage his disappointment. Mr. Minahan did finally settle down, but
only when his wife and the occupational therapist took him upstairs for his
daily visit.

Jay must have heard about the incident because when he finally
showed up, he insisted they leave even though they normally waited until the
place settled down after dinner.

“You don’t have anything left to do that can’t wait until
tomorrow, do you?”

He was being strange. Susanna couldn’t put her finger on why,
but said, “No, we can leave if you want.”

His smile flashed wide then he was unplugging her laptop and
hurrying her to pack her belongings.

Susanna didn’t bother asking, just shrugged on her coat. Then
he led her through the back employee door and to his golf cart parked at the
maintenance and engineering building.

To her surprise, though, Jay steered away from the family path
by the lake and onto the hard road.

“Okay, you’re flipping me out.” She couldn’t keep silent any
longer. “What’s going on?”

He slanted a laughing glance her way, green eyes sparkling.
“Trust me.”

He might be spiking her curiosity right now, but Susanna did
indeed trust him. Whatever he had going on was exciting him in a way she’d never
seen before. Flashing a smile as the chill wind bit her cheeks, she said, “I
do.”

The hard road veered to the right, and when he wheeled off the
road toward the cottage, she saw instantly why he’d insisted they’d leave the
facility early.

She would have missed his surprise once darkness fell.

“Oh, is this what you were doing today?” She breathed the words
on the edge of a breath.

“It is.” The golf cart ground to a stop, and Jay turned to her,
propping his arm over the seat to watch her reaction.

The front of the cottage had been touched by Christmas.
Wreathes with bright red bows perched in the center of each window and on the
door. Lush evergreen garland twined around the column and swagged along the
eaves and down the banister. Mistletoe hung from the arch leading up the
steps.

He’d even covered the caned chairs with red-and-green runners,
and strung lights in the bushes, transforming her charming cottage with
welcoming Christmas cheer.

“I wanted your first Christmas in your new home to be
special.”

Oh. The breath caught in her throat, making it impossible to
respond until that feeling of humility filtered through her, eased up its grip
to know how much he cared.

On what a big, big mess they were making together.

“It’s special.” She dragged her gaze from the sight, pressed a
kiss on his cheek. “And you’re special.”

Simple words she meant from the bottom of her heart, her heart
that was melting around the edges at the sight of his grimace. This man had
trouble accepting compliments.