33 The Return of Bowie Bravo (16 page)

Bowie nodded. “That’s right.” He glanced in Glory’s direction. She just happened to be looking at him right then. Their gazes collided.

They both quickly looked away.

Glory swallowed a spoonful of cereal. It felt like a handful of rocks going down. “Well, I’m sure it will all work out fine.” She said it cheerfully. Maybe too cheerfully.

Johnny beamed. “I’m going to get a puppy, soon as Bowie moves.”

“Oh, are you now?” She slid Bowie another look. He was staring straight ahead, chewing his cereal with great concentration.

“Yes, I am,” Johnny crowed. “I can’t wait.” He looked from her to Bowie and back again, a worried frown creasing his smooth brow. “Bowie said the puppy was okay with you.…”

“Yes,” she hurried to reassure him. It wasn’t his problem if she and Bowie didn’t see eye to eye on the concept of how to behave when having a wild, passionate affair. “Of course it’s okay. Bowie and I have discussed the puppy.”
Back when he was still talking to me.
“The puppy is fine.”

“Mom, I’ve been thinking…”

She smiled at him. He really was the greatest kid. “About what?”

“Maybe Bowie will let you and Sera come and have sleepovers, too. So you won’t be lonely when I’m gone to his house.” He turned to Bowie. “Bowie, can Mom and Sera come and stay at your house, too?”

Glory sipped her tea. No way was she touching that one. And she didn’t have to. Johnny had just lobbed the ball right into Bowie’s court. She sent the man a smug glance.

He didn’t even flinch. “Absolutely. Your mom and Sera can stay at my new house anytime.”

Johnny beamed. “See, Mom? You won’t be lonely after all. You and Sera will be there, too.”

“We’ll see,” she said and tried not to look daggers at the man calmly chewing his cereal across the table from her.

“You don’t
want
to come and stay at Bowie’s?” Johnny asked. He’d always been perceptive well beyond his years. Sometimes she really wished her son could be a tad more oblivious.

“I think probably it’s better if Sera and I stay here when you go to stay at Bowie’s.”

“Why?” Johnny demanded.

Glory’s heart sank as she scrambled to come up with the right reply to that dreaded
why.

And then Bowie said, “Your mom has been very good to me, letting me stay here so that I can get to know you. She’s welcome at my new house anytime. But that doesn’t mean she
has
to come. Your mom lives here. And so does Sera. That’s just how it is.”

“Oh,” Johnny said. “Okay.” And he picked up his spoon and dug into his cereal again.

Stunned at how exactly right Bowie’s response had been—how adult, how calm, how simple, how downright fatherly—Glory picked up her spoon, too. She finished her cereal.

It tasted a lot like humble pie.

That night, she wanted to go to Bowie. Go to him and beg him, as Angie had suggested, to give her another chance.

On his terms. For the world to see.

The incident at the table that morning had shown her a hard truth. Johnny would be just fine if she and Bowie got together. Her son was a well-balanced person with a very strong sense of self. He would be fine, whatever happened—or didn’t happen—between her and Bowie.

He had already accepted Bowie fully into his life. He’d loved Matteo and thought of him as a father. The loss of Matteo had been rough. But now he had Bowie. He wouldn’t have to grow up as Bowie had, without the steadying hand of a dad.

Glory was so grateful for that.

And she really had to quit using her son as an excuse not to let Bowie get too close. She needed to be braver, stronger,
better
than she’d been so far. And she sure did need to be a lot more truthful.

But then she looked at Matteo’s smiling face in the picture on her night table and it just seemed so wrong.

So immeasurably sad.

He had been so good to her, so generous. So true. He’d given her all that he had. And now he was gone.

And what, really, would be left of him if she let even her loyalty to him go? It seemed that once she turned to Bowie fully and honestly, for everyone to see, then it would be as if Matteo had never existed.

Or worse, as if he’d been merely a placeholder in her life. The one who stepped in and helped her get by until Bowie Bravo returned to reclaim his son and stand beside her at last.

Maybe that wasn’t true, but it felt that way. So she straightened her wedding-day picture on the night table and climbed into her bed alone.

Thursday morning, after Johnny had left for school and Bowie was out in the workshop building beautiful furniture for rich people, the front doorbell rang. Glory was walking the kitchen floor with Sera at the time. She’d fed her and changed her and still, Sera kept fussing.

Glory carried the crying baby out to the front hall. Sera wailed in her ear as she pulled open the door.

The woman on the other side was tall and slim, with hair the color of a raven’s wing flowing like a dark waterfall halfway down her back. She might have walked straight out of the pages of a fashion magazine, all sleek and perfect, with big green eyes and lips that looked like she’d stolen them from Angelina Jolie.

She took Glory in at a glance. And dismissed her just as fast. “Bowie Bravo, please,” she said in a thoroughly bored tone of voice.

Sera wailed some more and squirmed on her shoulder. Glory pressed a kiss to her temple and rocked her from side to side, “In the back,” she said, catching sight of the red Mercedes waiting at the base of the front walk.

The woman became even more bored, if that was possible. She let out a slow sigh and asked in a tone suitable for questioning the village idiot, “The back of…”

Sera kept wailing. The woman winced at the sound. Glory pointed toward the stone path beside the porch. “Follow that walkway around to the back. There’s a barn. Bowie’s got a workshop inside.”

The woman turned away, dismissing Glory without another word.

Glory shut the door. “Shh, it’s all right,” she whispered to her baby, as she reminded herself that no way was she running into the laundry room to look out the window over the folding table.

Sera did not shush. And Glory was already heading through the front hall.

She made it to the laundry room just as Bowie’s visitor reached the workshop door. Glory stared at that river of black hair, at that perfect rear end as the woman lifted her slim hand to knock.

A moment later, Bowie, in dusty jeans and one of those old chambray shirts of his, the ones that clung so lovingly to his deep, muscular chest, pulled open the door. He smiled at the woman, said something, probably her name.

She let out a glad cry that Glory could hear from all the way in the laundry room.

And then she threw her arms around him.

Her cheeks burning and her hopeless heart twisting painfully under her ribs, Glory spun from the window and went to the kitchen. Sera kept on wailing and Glory kept walking her, into the central hall, up the stairs, into and out of each of the rooms up there. She made a circuit of the second floor, then went downstairs again and started all over on the first.

Finally, an hour or so later, the poor sweetheart wore herself out. Glory put her in her crib and then couldn’t stop herself from looking out the master bedroom’s bay window.

The red car was gone.

Whatever Bowie and that strange woman had been doing out in the workshop, they’d finished in under an hour—not that it mattered. It didn’t. Bowie had his own life and she didn’t care in the least if he wanted to have wild sex with some gorgeous bad-attitude rich bitch.

Except that it
did
matter. And she
did
care.

And hadn’t she promised herself she would start being more truthful? With herself, first and foremost.

She turned from the window. There was plenty to do around the house to keep her mind off Bowie. She got to work with the vacuum and a can of Pledge. And after lunch, she went over to the hardware store and ran the register until it was time to go pick up Johnny and his cousins from school.

At dinner, Bowie didn’t say a word about the woman with the red car. Glory almost asked him. But she knew that no matter how hard she tried to sound merely curious, her real feelings were bound to show. And Johnny was right there, happily pounding down his favorite mac and cheese with ham. It somehow didn’t seem appropriate to start questioning Bowie about another woman in front of their son.

That evening dragged on endlessly. And when she finally got both kids quiet in their beds, she went downstairs for her tea and sat at the table for over an hour, hoping against hope that Bowie might come in again for once, wishing that they might sit and talk the way they used to. Not even really thinking about the black-haired woman anymore. Only thinking of Bowie and missing him so.

But he didn’t come. And at nine-thirty, she climbed the stairs to bed. As she was brushing her teeth she heard the faint sound of the back door opening downstairs. He must have been waiting for her to go to bed before he came inside.

That didn’t surprise her. But it did make her feel even more glum and despondent than she already was.

When she turned off the tap, she could still hear water running. He was having his shower. Glory closed her eyes and hung her head and willed away the image of Bowie, naked, water streaming over his golden head and down his beautiful, powerful body.…

She went back to the bedroom and put on her favorite cozy red flannelette pajamas and got into bed. By then, the water had stopped running downstairs.

Faintly, she heard the back door close.

He was gone. Back to the workshop. Another day gone by in which they’d barely spoken.

Tomorrow was Friday, the day he would sign the final papers on his new property. He would move out.

She would see him often. It was a small town and they had family in common. Not to mention that they shared a son. There would be no end of opportunities to run into him.

And very few chances for them to ever really talk. It was only going to get more difficult to bridge this gap she’d put between them.

She sat up, turned on the lamp, saw her husband’s dear face in the nightstand photo—and knew she had yet to give herself permission to move on, to openly and proudly love another man.

To love Bowie…

Not that she was sure Bowie even wanted to be loved by her at this point. Maybe he had that black-haired woman out there in the shop with him tonight.…

No, she knew he didn’t. She couldn’t have said exactly how she knew, but she did. The other woman was only a distraction, someone for her to focus her frustration and anger on, someone for her to blame.

The real issue, the thing that kept her up nights and made her days a misery, was that she hated the idea of him moving to his new place without the two of them coming to some sort of peace with each other.

There wasn’t a lot of time left to find that peace. If she didn’t make an effort, she could miss her chance. He would be gone. When he lived someplace else, it would become even harder for her to go to him, to talk to him privately.

She had to make a move and she had to make it soon.

Glory pushed back the covers and reached for her robe.

Chapter Twelve

W
hen he heard the knock at the workshop door, Bowie considered not answering it. He was afraid it might be Fiona. She’d said she was driving straight to Reno and catching a flight back to New York.

However, you just never knew with Fiona. She changed her mind as often she changed her shoes. He didn’t feel up to dealing with her a second time in a twenty-four-hour period.

But what if it was Glory?

It didn’t seem likely. Since she’d left him Friday night to his blackberry pie and his empty cot, she hardly seemed to be able to look at him. And she only spoke to him when it was absolutely necessary.

Still, he had to know.

He shoved back the blankets, pulled on his jeans, stuck his feet in his mocs and went to answer.

The sight of her sucked all the breath from his lungs.

She stood in the halo of light from the back porch, clutching the top of her red robe together, her hair loose and a little tangled, shining on her shoulders. He’d always loved the color of her hair: dark as coffee, but coffee streaked with butterscotch.

“Um, I was…” Her velvety cheeks flamed pink. Why? Because she’d come out here to where he slept when she should have been in her own bed? Because he hadn’t finished buttoning his pants and he didn’t have a shirt on? He didn’t know nor did he care. All that mattered was that she was standing there. She tried again. “I was hoping we might talk a little?”

“Sure.” He stepped back, gestured her inside and shut the door as soon she cleared the doorway. She went straight to the stove. He used the moment when she had her back to him to take care of that last button at the top of his fly.

She turned to him. Her sweet mouth trembled. And then she opened it—and a flood of words came pouring out. “Since Friday, we’vd hardly spoken and I…oh, I don’t know, you’ll be leaving soon and I want us to, well, I guess, be friends, at least. I want you to know that I do realize I’ve been the dishonest one in this whole thing since you came back. I keep telling myself I’ll be more truthful and then, somehow, I’m not so truthful after all—like today when that woman showed up and I told her how to find you out here and then I told myself I wasn’t going to run to the laundry room and spy on you through the window in there. But I did, I ran in there with Sera screaming in my arms and stood there, rocking my poor little baby, watching that woman throw herself at you. I hated that, hated to see her hands on you, even though I knew I had absolutely no say in whether you might be kissing some bitchy black-haired woman in really great clothes. I had no say about anything when it came to you because I had walked away from you Friday and that was it for you and me.…” She had to pause for a breath right then.

He saw his chance and seized it. “I wasn’t kissing Fiona, Glory.”

She swallowed, hard. “Fiona. That’s her name?”

“Yeah, Fiona Sedgeman. She’s a customer. A very good customer. And sometimes she’s a pain because she’s such a man-eater, but there’s nothing going on between her and me.”

“Nothing?” She sounded breathless.

“Zip.”

“Oh, okay.” She almost smiled, but then she seemed to catch herself—and scowled instead. “Not that it’s any concern of mine.”

He said, very gently, “Cut the crap, Glory.”

She winced, but then she nodded. “Yeah, you’re right.” A small, embarrassed laugh escaped her. “I seriously need to cut the crap, but I seem to be having some real trouble doing that.”

He wanted to reassure her. He wanted to take her in his arms. He wanted a whole lot of things that he was unlikely to get. “Look, it’s okay. If you want to be just friends, well, we can work with that. We can—”

She let out a soft cry. “Oh, damn you, Bowie Bravo. You know I want a whole lot more from you than friendship. But it’s just that I…well, it feels all wrong to me. To forget Matteo so easily, to turn my back on his memory, on everything he and I had and all he was to me…”

“Matteo.” He said her dead husband’s name carefully. “Not Johnny.”

“No.” Her big eyes held his. They begged for his understanding. “I see now, I do. Johnny’s okay, just like you said. He’ll be all right with it, however things work out.”

He prompted, “And it’s not what people in town will say, not what they’ll think about you?”

“Uh-uh, it’s me. It’s what
I
think. And I think…I feel like I’m betraying my husband every time I look at you.” A sad little laugh escaped her. “Which really says a lot about me, huh? I mean, because I did a lot more than just look at you on Friday night. Because I
still
want to do a lot more than look at you.…”

But she wouldn’t. He could see it in her eyes. What the hell was it about life? Why did it always have to be so damn unfair? “How am I supposed to fight a dead man, Glory?”

“You’re not. Of course you’re not.”

He fisted his hands at his sides and then forced his fists to open. It always helped when he wanted to punch something to remember that the choice was his. He didn’t have to be ruled by the heat of the moment.

“You’re angry.” Her mouth was trembling again.

Start with honesty, son,
Wily always used to say.
The truth is where all the important stuff begins.
“Yeah, I’m angry, but I’m not going to start breaking things. I’m not that guy anymore.”

The sheen of tears made her eyes gleam like polished amber. “I know you’re not. You’re…good, Bowie. A truly good man.”

It was too much, standing there apart from her.

All the years he’d kept himself apart from her. And now he was finally ready to be the man she needed. Finally he’d broken free of the drinking, of the never-ending need to take on all comers with his two fists. He’d found work. Good work at which he excelled. He’d returned home and discovered he wanted to stay there. He’d earned the trust of the son he’d left behind. And every time he held Glory’s baby in his arms, he felt like a million bucks. He wanted to be something like a father to that little girl. He wanted that a lot.

And best of all,
most
of all, there was Glory. Or so he’d let himself believe there for a few magical hours on Friday night. He’d let himself hope that he finally had a real chance with Glory. He’d given her up once so she and Johnny could have a shot at a better life. But now, well, he had something real to offer her. His heart, his sobriety, the honest work of his two hands.

They could make something fine, the two of them. A good life together. A family.

Except that they couldn’t. Because Matteo Rossi’s ghost stood between them now.

No. No damn way.

He went to her, eating up the space that separated him from her in three long strides.

“Oh, Bowie.” She gazed up at him so intently. He saw her love there in her eyes. Saw her yearning, the same yearning he felt every time he looked at her, every time he heard her name.

He took her shoulders. She trembled at his touch but she didn’t pull away. He said, “I always thought well of Matteo. I respected him. I
liked
him. And back in the day, I didn’t find much to like in most people. You know that, right?”

Wordlessly, she nodded. A single tear got away from her, breaking the dam of her lower lid, sliding down her cheek. “I know.”

“But right now, I could almost hate him. He had four great years with you. I never envied him the time he had with you. Until tonight.”

“Don’t.” She said it softly.

“Don’t?” He gave the word back to her on a growl. “Don’t what? Don’t touch you? Don’t look at you in the same hungry way that you look at me? Don’t kiss you?”

“Bowie.” She said his name as a warning.

A warning he refused to heed. He pulled her into his arms.

She resisted, but only for a moment. And then she melted into him, her soft little body going pliant, her mouth lifted up.

He listened to the hot pounding of his blood, to the need that sang inside him, the heat that flared down low. He lowered his mouth to hers and he kissed her.

She kissed him back with a lost little cry, opening to him so he could sweep his greedy tongue inside. Her hands pressed against his heart and then slid up to link around his neck, to pull him even closer. He felt her fingers at his nape, in his hair. He touched her hair, too. He ran his fingers through it, loving the warmth of it, the silky texture of every separate strand.

He wanted to kiss her forever. While he was kissing her, he could almost forget that she refused to be with him.

Not in the real way.

Not in the way that lasts, the way that matters.

In the end, with another cry, she turned her mouth away from his and buried her face against his shoulder. “No,” she whispered on a torn husk of breath.

He opened his arms and stepped back from her. She swayed on her feet, and then caught herself and found her balance. He looked down at the crown of her bent head, waiting.

Until, finally, she lifted her chin and faced him, her mouth so soft and red from kissing him, her cheeks hot with color.

“How long?” he asked in a ragged growl. “Until you can let him go, until being with me doesn’t have to mean that you’re betraying him?”

Those whiskey-warm eyes pleaded for his understanding. “I don’t know. I’m so sorry.”

He didn’t feel all that sympathetic right then. “You really think he would want this, huh? Want you to be alone and unhappy just to be true to his memory?”

“Of course not. Matteo wasn’t like that.”

“No, he wasn’t. You ought to consider that, Glory, while you’re turning your back on the future, on what you and I could have together—on what both Johnny and Sera need.”

The next night, after Johnny was in bed, Bowie surprised her. He came in and sat at the table with her while she had her tea.

She watched his face across from her and tried not to wish he would kiss her again. But she did wish it. And that made her feel ridiculous and small-minded and pitiful, too. He wasn’t there for kissing. She knew that from just looking at him.

He said, “I signed the final papers on the Halstotter place today.”

“I’m…happy for you.”

“Thanks.” He shifted in his chair. “I’m moving out tomorrow.”

She felt slightly dizzy and then realized she’d forgotten to breathe. She sucked in a big breath and let it out in a rush. “Well, all right.”

“I wanted to touch base with you before I go.”

“Touch base,” she echoed. “Of course.”

He pushed a small square of paper across the table at her. “My new phone number at the house. I got lucky and managed to get them to install it today.”

“Great.” She took the paper, got up and pinned it to the corkboard next to the phone.

When she slid back into her chair, he said, “And also, I wanted to talk a little about Johnny.” Johnny. Her stomach knotted and a headache started pounding at her temples. She resisted the need to try and massage it away. He went on. “I mean, about where we go from here, as parents.”

She picked up her tea by rote, lifted it to her lips, took a careful swallow. “I see.”

“It’s just that there are several things we should start thinking about.”

She had a pretty good idea what those things might be. Still, she needed to let him speak for himself. “Such things as?”

“I want joint custody, Glory—no, not right this minute,” he reassured her. “You can…take your time about it, get used to the idea. But eventually, in the next year or two, I want you to consider letting me be equally responsible for him. I want us to talk it over with him, so he’ll know he can count on both of us as his parents.”

The headache squeezed harder. She had a powerful desire to shout at him, to tell him in no uncertain terms that he would never take her son from her.

But then he addressed her fear directly. “I’m not trying to take him from you, Glory. I would never do that. You have to know that by now.”

She did know that. And she believed him. What he asked was only fair. Only right. For Johnny’s sake. “It’s just…it’s what you said. Give me time. Let me get accustomed to it. Let’s play it by ear for a while. Okay?”

“Absolutely.”

She knew there was more. “What else?”

He had his hand on the table. He traced the patterns in the wood as he liked to do. She tried not to remember what it felt like to have that hand tracing other patterns, arousing patterns, on her naked skin. He glanced up at her. “We never talked about his last name. You just…gave him
your
last name when he was born.”

She heard a whooshing in her ears. Her own blood, pumping much too fast through her veins. Her mouth tasted of copper. Of defensiveness. Of guilt. She had to force her lips to form the truth. “I shouldn’t have done that. I was…bitter. You were drunk all the time and you wouldn’t even let me have our baby in peace. You came barging in while I was in labor, demanding that I marry you.…”

He nodded. She saw no judgment of her in his eyes. “I was a complete asshat.”

Asshat. The word made her laugh—a strangled sort of sound, with more pain than humor in it. “Yes, you were.”