Valentine's Child (13 page)

What’s best for you …

And then he remembered that he had to meet Roxanne and Matt at Beachtime Coffee and talk wedding.

It had about ruined his day.

But now, here, face-to-face with Sherry, he realized the worst of the day had yet to happen. His unspoken promise to Caroline hung over his head, but it wasn’t foremost on his mind. What he was feeling now was frustration and annoyance and a certain amount of flat-out anger. What the hell was she doing here, anyway? She’d run out of town nearly fourteen years ago, and he didn’t feel one iota of pleasure that she’d returned.

Oh, sure, she still looked great. Better, in fact, in some ways. Truth to tell, his first impression was how full and soft her lips seemed, how her skin glowed, how her eyes swam with secrets. Her hair was lustrous, shoulder-length and shining with good health. Her skin as smooth as satin, pale and nearly pore-less — just like in high school. Only the finest of lines and an overall maturity — and sadness, that seemed to have infected her personality — gave away her age.

Still, passion simmered beneath her cool expression. He could feel it like a pulse. And she’d certainly been sharp and prickly with him last night. That was the Sherry he remembered. The one with the wicked lines.

Except she’d lost that particular trait over the time they’d dated. He couldn’t recall getting the rough side of her tongue at all, in fact, until that last fight they’d had the night before she’d left town. Amazing. He could remember every word and expression from that argument and still he didn’t understand.

One year of his life he’d given to her. Part of his life that still glimmered brightly. He hadn’t loved her, but he’d certainly felt passionate about her. She’d consumed him for that year. Had been a part of his days and nights. As important to him as air and water.

Yet, he couldn’t let her know. He’d been smart enough to recognize those pitfalls without actually tripping into them. Giving her that much power would have been like ripping out his soul and handing it over to a force as mercurial and inconstant as the wind. Sherry Sterling had whispered words of love and need and he’d responded with silence and a certain amount of skepticism. Other girls had sworn their love, but love was sometimes a cover-up for a person’s own hidden agenda. People fell in and out of love all the time. It was an overused four-letter word.

He’d never, never been in love.

So, why was his heart thundering like a racehorse? Why did he feel so intensely conscious of the heat of the room, the noises of laughter and conversation, the smell of Sherry’s perfume, sweet as sugar — or was just another odor of the coffeehouse?

He had the strangest desire to reach out and grab her by the hair and haul her to him, so that he could stare into her eyes and guess her secrets.
I want to know,
he thought desperately.
Why? Why? Why did you leave?

Instead, he heard his own voice say coldly, “I remember Sherry. She’s hard to forget.”

The blush that raced across her pale cheeks surprised him. He hadn’t expected her to be sensitive. She’d reached epic proportions as an ogre in his mind, he realized.

“Good to see you, too, J.J.,” she answered with an identical coolness, and he wondered if she’d used his initials deliberately, a tiny weapon.

You’re cynical as hell,
he told himself angrily.

Roxanne leaped into the moment. “Oh, my gosh, maybe it isn’t
Sterling
anymore! Sherry, I forgot to ask. Are you married? Holy cow, you probably hitched up with a doctor and have six children and two vacation homes and an English sheepdog yourself.”

Jake’s stomach clenched. It took every ounce of control he possessed not to react, but he kept his gaze trained on her face and witnessed the shadow of emotion that crossed her features.
No husband.
But something, he thought.

“Well?” Roxanne asked.

“Not married,” she said lightly.

“How about children?”

She actually flinched and then Matt moaned, “Rox,” again, as he often did. Jake wondered how they would ever stay married; their personalities were exact opposites.

“What?” Roxanne demanded. “She could have children from a previous marriage, couldn’t she?” She turned to Sherry. “Right?”

“No previous marriage, either,” Sherry said, clutching her purse. She drew a shaky breath and said, “I’d better get going. I’ve got a lot to do.”

With that she scurried for the door, glancing back once, her lips parting as if she had something more to say. Jake realized she was looking at him, and he lifted his brows, aware she was struggling.

“What?” he asked.

“I …”

Incredulously, he thought she was going to say,
I love you.
He could practically reach down her throat and grab out the words. Instead she closed her mouth and regarded him with an expression of anguish and fury.

What the hell is going on?
he wondered.

Sherry could do nothing but stare. Words wouldn’t pass her lips, no matter how hard she tried. She couldn’t tell him right here, right now. Maybe she couldn’t tell him at all.

Damn him, she thought half-hysterically. He looked too much the same. In that split second when his eyes met hers, Sherry recognized the turmoil in her breast for what it was: love. A love that would not die no matter how impossible and terrible it made her life. A love that defied reason and common sense. A love she wished she could kill, for it had brought her nothing but heartache and misery.

She pulled her gaze from his, wishing she wasn’t so drawn in by him. She could smell his scent and when he moved, his black leather jacket hugged his frame appealingly. She couldn’t think. Her chest felt too tight inside her skin.

How about children?
Roxanne had asked.

Just one …
Just J.J.’s …

“Sherry, for Pete’s sake, you can’t leave yet.” Roxanne waved at her to sit back down. “We don’t know anything about you. No children, no husband… Is there a ‘significant other’?”

“Rox!” Matt was exasperated, but there was an element of love in the way he looked at his future wife, too. He could see the humor of her ways, Sherry realized. What would it be like to have that kind of relationship? That kind of trust?

“I’m single and intend to remain that way,” Sherry told her. “I’m glad for you and Matt. I’ll try to make the wedding, but really, I’ve got to go.”

J.J. seemed impervious to the conversation. His brows were drawn together, his jaw tense. Sherry wondered what he was thinking. He’d always been so incredibly insightful except in one area — her.

“I saw Ryan Delmato last night,” she added as she pushed open the door.

“At Bernie’s?” Roxanne asked, interested.

Sherry nodded.

“Looks the same, doesn’t it?” Remember when we used to all hang out there? Hard to believe so much time has passed. Grab a seat, Jake,” she finished, waving him to another unoccupied wooden chair.

“I can’t stay. I just dropped by because I knew you were waiting for me.” The timbre of his voice did strange things to Sherry’s equilibrium.

“Are you nuts? You’ve
got
to stay. This is my wedding, for Pete’s sake!”

“I’ll get things straight with Jake,” Matt interrupted. “Later,” he said to his friend.

Sherry practically bolted from the coffee shop, unwilling to have J.J. so close on her heels. This was not the time.

On the street, rain fell in an unrelenting January drizzle, swept sideways by sudden rushes of wind off the ocean. Sherry hesitated a moment, angry with herself. The hell it wasn’t! What was she waiting for? A voice from heaven dictating her path? Here was a golden opportunity — away from Patrice Beckett, no less — and once again, all she could do was run.

Closing her eyes, she willed up her courage from some deep well inside her soul. She’d come to tell him about Mandy. She had no choice. For her daughter — and for herself, she realized dimly — she needed this secret revealed. But a cowardly part of her kept saying,
Don’t rush. It’s only the first day. You’ve got time. Give yourself an opportunity to adjust. You’ve had a lot of shocks. Be kind to yourself.

Suddenly he was just behind her right shoulder. Sherry faced the parking lot, afraid to look at him. Belatedly, she realized she was standing right next to his black Jeep. He had to think she was waiting for him.

“So, why did you stop by the house last night?” he asked, his breath tickling the nape of her neck.

He’d thought that one over, she realized. She remembered that about him, too; his intensely analytical mind. He dissected everything, searching for its true meaning. She’d been afraid he would discern the secret of her pregnancy before she got away from him. Patrice had.

“Just reacquainting myself with old friends.”

“Try again,” he muttered.

She was afraid to move. He was so close. Close enough to lean back and touch. “How like you to distrust me,” she answered with forced bitterness. “I guess it’s true what they say — some things never change.”

“I never distrusted you.”

“Oh, yes, you did.”

“You mean, after you slept with Tim Delaney?”

“I didn’t sleep with him, and you know it.”

“I only know what you told me. And damn near everything out of your mouth was a lie.”

He said it without heat. Matter-of-factly. As if it were a proven truth and she should agree with him completely.

Steeling herself, Sherry twisted half-around, meeting his deep gray eyes and hostile face with a fury she hadn’t known she possessed. They studied each other for several long moments and then she said, “How many years has it been, J.J.? Over a decade. Closing in on fifteen. And the first thing that we have to talk about is whether I slept with Tim Delaney when I was a senior in
high school?
”

He had the grace to look slightly ashamed, but it didn’t alter the belligerent slant of his jaw, or his battle-tense stance.

“I didn’t lie,” she told him flatly.

“You lied about Caroline.”

A barb of truth hit home. She hadn’t actually lied about Caroline Newsmith, but she’d definitely done her part to let others know Caroline wasn’t the sweet thing everyone thought. “I didn’t like her much,” Sherry admitted. “She didn’t like me, either. We were always in a cold war over you.”

That stopped him. His lips parted, as if he were about to refute her, but how could he? She and Caroline had been J.J. Beckett’s chosen women. Only Caroline had been the blonde angel and Sherry the dark-haired seductress. Or at least that was how Caroline told the story, and in the end, Caroline’s was the only tale to tell.

“Well, it doesn’t matter now,” he said, attempting to end the conversation. But now, perversely, Sherry wanted to keep going.

“Oh, I don’t know. There’re a lot of unresolved things in our past, don’t ya think?”

“Just high school stuff.”

Sherry managed to taut a smile. Her high school experience had set the stage for the last unhappy fourteen years. She’d been acting by rote, just going through the motions. The events of her youth had stripped the rest of her life of color and meaning.

Just high school stuff, indeed.

“Caroline and I are engaged,” he said, thrusting his hands into the pockets of his jacket. “It took us long enough.”

“Roxanne told me.”

He nodded.

“But you didn’t want to get married Valentine’s Day.”

His curt nod was her only answer as he stared over her head to some distant point she couldn’t see. She knew he was thinking of that last Valentine’s Day in their senior year, when she’d flirted so dismally with Tim, hoping to hold on to the last remnant of J.J.’s affection. She’d loved him with a desperate teenage love but he hadn’t cared for her the same way. And everything had backfired.

“You’re really a slut,” Annie had whispered out of the side of her mouth, mean and hard, as Sherry walked out of school one disastrous afternoon in early February. “Everyone knows you’re doing it with Tim just to get J.J. back. Well, J.J. hates you. He had you and now Tim has, too!”

“That is such a lie!”

Annie’s cold glare dug into her soul. “Yeah? Everyone knows what a fucking slut you are. Thank God J.J. finally came to his senses after he had you, too.”

Sarcasm was always been Sherry’s armor but she couldn’t think of a response terrible enough to hurl at Caroline’s mouthpiece. Stumbling down the front steps of the school, she’d fought back building tears. When Tim called her that night to ask her to dinner the following weekend on Valentine’s Day, she’d huddled beneath her covers and cried herself to sleep.

What happened?
She’d asked herself over and over again in the weeks following her night in the tree house. She’d given herself to him because she loved him and almost as soon as the deed was done, his ardor had cooled. Was he really that shallow and uncaring? She wouldn’t believe it. But regardless, she knew she’d made a terrible mistake. She had no desire or intention of making the same one with Tim. She still loved J.J. so much.

So she limped through until Valentine’s Day, accepting Tim’s invitation. But as soon as she and Tim arrived at one of Oceantides’ nicer restaurants, lo and behold, J.J. and Caroline were two tables over. Calling on acting skills she hadn’t known she possessed, Sherry brightened, pretending as if she were having the time of her life, but her performance was lost on J.J. He paid no attention. All he could see was Caroline.