Authors: Sherryl Woods
Tags: #Fiction, #General, #Romance, #Contemporary
Her mom looked as surprised as Annie felt.
“How do you know this?” Dana Sue asked.
“I actually took the time to talk to him,” Ronnie said. “He’s shy, not dumb.” He gave Annie a pointed look. “Another lesson, by the way.”
“Are you trying to fix me up with him or something?” she asked, after swallowing more food and chasing it down with unsweetened tea.
“Of course not,” her dad said at once. “He’s too old for you.”
“Then why are we even having this discussion?” she demanded, irritated that she’d missed the chance to get to know a guy who sounded a lot more interesting than she’d guessed. Maybe she was a snob, just the way her father had hinted without saying it.
“I think I know,” her mom said, regarding her dad with an amused expression. “He’s distracting you, so you won’t think about food. You’ll just eat it. Worked like a charm, too.”
Annie stared at her. “What do you mean?”
“You’ve eaten a whole sandwich, sweet pea.”
Annie stared at the plate and saw that all the sections were gone. Her dad might have scarfed down more than his share, but not all of them. And her mom didn’t even
like
turkey sandwiches.
“I ate a whole sandwich?” she asked, still doubtful even after her dad confirmed it with a pleased nod. But wouldn’t that have made her feel sick? Annie didn’t feel ill, though. She felt okay. She’d actually had a whole meal with other people and hadn’t freaked out. An odd sense of triumph washed over her. She grinned at her dad. “Cool. Sneaky, but cool.”
“I think that about sums up your dad,” her mom said, but she was laughing, so it didn’t sound mean at all.
Annie recalled a lot of meals around this table, and almost all of them had been like this, filled with teasing banter and some serious talk about life and stuff. She’d missed that more than anything when her dad had gone. Her meals with her mom, the few times they’d even bothered, had been silent and lonely, even with both of them sitting right here. Lately, her mom was at the restaurant most nights, and never had time to sit down and eat with Annie.
“I’m really glad you’re here,” she told her dad, not caring if it made her mom crazy to hear it. Maybe if her mom finally realized how much it meant to her to have her dad back in her life, she would do something to make sure he stayed.
“Me, too,” he told her. “I’ve missed being in Serenity.”
“Not just that,” Annie said, anxious to get her point across. “I meant here with us.”
“Annie…” her mom cautioned.
“I’m just saying it’s great he’s here.” Annie’s tone had a touch of belligerence. “That’s how I feel. Dr. McDaniels says I need to own my feelings.”
She stood up. “I’m going to take a nap now. Make sure I wake up way before everyone gets here, especially if we’re going to have dinner first. I want to look really nice so they won’t worry I’m gonna collapse or something.”
“I’ll make sure you’re up in plenty of time,” her mom promised.
Annie looked at her dad. “And you’ll still be here, right?”
“I’ll be here,” he confirmed.
“Couldn’t you just
stay
here?” she asked, knowing even as she posed the question that her mom was probably freaking out.
“I’m close by,” her dad said. “We’ll see each other all the time.”
Obviously, he wasn’t going to put her mom on the spot, but Annie wasn’t afraid to do it. And she thought she knew the perfect way to pull it off. She’d bring it up at tomorrow’s family counseling session. She had a feeling neither one of them would want to deny her what she wanted if she kicked up enough fuss about it with Dr. McDaniels. Okay, it was manipulative. But she could live with that if it pushed her mom and dad one step closer to getting back together. Sometimes adults just needed a hard push to get them to do what they secretly wanted to do, anyway.
“Don’t even think about it,” Dana Sue muttered fiercely the instant Annie left the room.
“Think about what?” Ronnie inquired innocently, though he knew perfectly well what she was referring to.
“You’re not moving back in here and that’s final,” she said. “Not even for Annie’s sake.”
“She’s going to bring this up at that family counseling session tomorrow,” Ronnie predicted.
Dana Sue stared at him with alarm. “She wouldn’t dare.”
“Of course she would,” he said. “Didn’t you see that gleam in her eye? Our Annie is on a mission and she knows she has leverage.”
Dana Sue sank back in her chair, then reached for a spoon and began eating the remaining potato salad.
“Should you…” Ronnie began, only to fall silent at her withering look. She did toss the spoon back into the bowl, though.
“Well, this is one time she’s not getting her way,” Dana Sue said forcefully—though she didn’t look as if she believed that. “You’re just going to have to back me up on this.”
“What if I think she has a point?” he asked.
“Then you’re crazy,” she said bluntly. “It would be lunacy for you to move back in here under any circumstances.”
“There is a guest room,” he reminded her. “And I’m wasting money staying at the inn.”
“The guest room is about five hundred miles closer to my room than you ought to be,” she snapped. “Isn’t it time for you to go back to Beaufort or…or wherever you’ve been?”
“Afraid not,” he said. “I quit my job over there.”
She regarded him with dismay. “Why would you do that?”
“It wasn’t fair to ask them to hold it for me when I had no intention of going back.”
“But you have to go back,” she said, sounding desperate.
“Because?”
“You know perfectly well why. You cheated on me, Ronnie, and I will not have you underfoot every time I turn around, reminding me of that.”
Obviously this still wasn’t the right time to bring up the hardware store. “What do you suppose folks in Serenity remember most—that I cheated, or that you threw everything I own onto the front lawn and then chased me off before I could gather up half of it?”
She winced. “It’s probably a toss-up,” she said stubbornly, though they both knew that wasn’t true. People could forget a man’s foibles, but they weren’t likely to forget a woman in the throes of a very noisy revenge. A commotion like that made a lasting impression.
He grinned at her. “Care to take a poll?”
She stared at him. “What are you talking about?”
“Let’s go for a walk and ask everyone we pass what they remember most about the two of us.”
She shook her head. “You’re pathetic.”
“How is that pathetic?”
“You know there are only women home this time of day, and all you have to do is ooze a little of that charm of yours and they’ll all side with you. If you get really lucky, one of
them
might ask you to move in.”
“I thought women stuck together when it came to things like this.”
“They do,” she said, then amended, “Mostly. Look at Maddie, though. She’s already back to being your best buddy. She always was a sucker for that crooked smile of yours. At least Helen isn’t so easily duped.”
“Helen’s turning bitter about men,” Ronnie observed. “She needs to find the right one quick, before all those nasty divorces make her too cynical.”
Dana Sue bristled. “That’s a lousy thing to say.”
“Don’t tell me you haven’t thought the same thing,” he chided. “You’re too good a friend not to see what’s happening to her.”
Dana Sue sighed. “Okay, you have a point. She is a little jaded and she does need somebody in her life who can mellow her out. I just don’t know if the kind of man she needs can be found in Serenity.”
“She works all over the state,” Ronnie reminded her, relieved to have distracted Dana Sue from their own relationship for the moment. “Surely somewhere in South Carolina there’s an eligible man who’s smart enough and brave enough to take her on.”
“She does meet some nice men,” Dana Sue said. “She even fixed me up with a few of them.”
A streak of pure jealousy shot through Ronnie at the thought of Dana Sue with some stuffy, white-collar guy. “You and Helen don’t have the same taste in men,” he commented darkly.
“And look where that got me,” she retorted.
“More than twenty years of bliss, if you go back to high school,” he said, undaunted by the barb.
“And two years of pure misery,” she responded.
Ronnie bit back a smile. “If you’d given me half a chance, the misery wouldn’t have lasted that long.”
She balled up her napkin and threw it at him. “Not going to happen.”
“We’ll see,” he murmured. “We’ll see.”
Dana Sue might not want to admit it, but they were already making progress.
D
ana Sue lingered in the dining room, her gaze caught by the sight of Ronnie and Cal off in a corner talking sports or something like old pals. Ronnie had never gotten along that well with Bill, Maddie’s first husband, despite having known him since high school. In fact, Ronnie had been the first to recognize that Bill was all wrong for Maddie. It turned out that his perception of Bill as selfish and unfeeling had been right on target.
Not that he’d ever spoken up, Dana Sue recalled. Not to Maddie, anyway. And he hadn’t wanted Dana Sue to share his impressions, either.
“Maddie’s married to him,” Ronnie had said on more than one occasion. “What I think of Bill doesn’t matter. For her sake, I’ll make the attempt to get along with him, the same way Helen does.”
At the time, Dana Sue had been surprised by the implication that Helen was no more enamored of Bill than Ronnie was. But it turned out that she, too, had been keeping quiet for Maddie’s sake. She’d never been nearly as reticent about Ronnie. Practically from the day they’d met, Helen had always expected the worst from him, and hadn’t kept silent about her fears.
Only Dana Sue had seen how Bill’s treatment of Maddie had bothered Ronnie. She had a hunch he was the only one of them who wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that Bill was having an affair with a nurse in his office. But of course, by then, Ronnie had been gone.
Watching him now, she noticed that he didn’t seem to have the same kind of issues with Cal, despite the age difference between Cal and Maddie that had set tongues wagging all over town a year or so ago.
When Ronnie glanced up and caught Dana Sue looking his way, he winked. A few minutes later he crossed the room and joined her.
“You and Cal seem to have found a lot to talk about,” she said, not entirely sure how she felt about the two of them turning into pals. It would be just one more thread weaving Ronnie into the fabric of her life.
“I like him,” he said. “He’s grounded and down-to-earth. He adores Maddie and the new baby, and Ty, Kyle and Katie clearly look up to him. He’s obviously been good for all of them.”
“Then you approve of her choice this time?”
“Not that it’s my business, but yes. He told me Bill wanted Maddie back once his relationship with his nurse fell apart. Is that true?”
Dana Sue nodded. “Thank goodness Maddie turned him down. She’s been happier with Cal than she ever was with Bill.”
Ronnie searched the room till his gaze landed on Maddie. “She’s glowing, isn’t she? Marriage and being a new mom suit her. With the other kids, she just looked tired, probably because Bill expected her to deal with everything at home while he concentrated totally on his career. I doubt that man ever changed a diaper or stayed up with a sick kid, despite being a pediatrician.”
When Ronnie turned back to Dana Sue, his expression softened. “You were beautiful when you were carrying Annie. You positively glowed.”
She regarded him doubtfully. “That must have been during the five seconds a day when I wasn’t throwing up.”
He stroked her cheek. “Don’t do that, Dana Sue.”
“Do what?”
“Put yourself down. You’re a gorgeous woman. Pregnancy only added to it.”
Dana Sue impulsively touched her rounded hips. “Now I have the extra pounds, but there won’t be any baby to show for them.”
Ronnie frowned at her. “I like the way you look.”
“Sure,” she scoffed. “Every man dreams of his wife gaining weight.”
He regarded her with obvious dismay. “I don’t get where this is coming from. Did you expect to be some tiny size your entire life, especially with your height? You look like a woman, Dana Sue. A healthy, attractive one who happens to have curves. If you ask me, that’s the way a woman ought to be.”
She wanted to believe him, wanted to see herself through his eyes, but all she could think about were the extra pounds she saw every time she stepped on the scale. There had been three more this morning. Having Ronnie back and getting under her skin had driven her to comfort food a little too often.
“You can’t mean that,” she protested.
Heat flared in his eyes and he stepped closer. Dana Sue instinctively backed up. He kept pace with her until her back hit the wall. There was no place left to go, and the determined glint in his eyes sent a shiver down her spine.
“You’re still the most desirable woman I’ve ever known,” he said quietly, his mouth hovering just over hers. “And I still want you.”
Dana Sue swallowed hard at the sincerity in his voice, which was accompanied by the darkening of his eyes. She knew that smoldering look, knew exactly where it usually led. But they had a houseful of people right now. Surely he wouldn’t…
With his hands on the wall on either side of her, trapping her in place, he leaned forward. Her mouth turned dry. When she opened it to utter a protest, his covered it. The shock of the kiss was familiar, the sensations ricocheting through her dangerous. Weak-kneed, she reached for him and held on for dear life as his tongue plundered and sent her head spinning.
It couldn’t still be like this between them, she thought, with one last attempt to cling to sanity. It was wrong to want him this badly, to want his hands to make good on the promises being made by his kisses, to want him inside her, bringing every part of her to life again.
But it felt so damn right, she admitted, as his body pressed against hers, surrounding her with heat and undeniable evidence that his desire was as powerful as hers.
Long before she was ready, he dragged himself away, looking as dazed as she felt.
“Remember that the next time you question how any man—how
I—
could want you,” he said, his voice a low rumble next to her ear.
“Uh-huh,” she said, her thoughts so scrambled she couldn’t come up with anything more.
Then he was gone, leaving her to sink onto the nearest chair and reach for a bottle of water chilling in a cooler filled with ice. If there hadn’t been a dozen people around, she would have poured it right over her head without a thought to the damage it would do to her hardwood floors. Instead, she settled for taking a long, slow swallow that did nothing to cool the heat still simmering inside her.
“Quite a performance,” Maddie commented, pulling up a chair and sitting beside her. “Those steamy kisses are getting to be a habit. I was afraid for a minute I was going to have to dump this ice over the two of you.”
“Why didn’t you?” Dana Sue asked, a plaintive note in her voice. “It might have snapped me back to my senses.”
“Doubtful,” Maddie said. “It’s going to take more than ice to put a chill on what’s going on between you two.”
“Don’t say that,” Dana Sue pleaded.
“It’s true. Why not accept it and run with it? You know you haven’t been happy without him.”
“And I was miserable because of him,” Dana Sue retorted.
“He made one terrible error in judgment,” Maddie said. “He learned his lesson.”
“How can I be sure of that?”
Maddie started to respond, then shrugged. “Maybe you can never be sure of anything, sweetie.” She glanced around until her gaze fell on Cal, who was chatting with Erik, Katie half-asleep in his lap. “Maybe you just have to grab on to what makes you happy now and then work like crazy to hold on to it.”
“I thought that’s what I was doing when we were married,” she said. “And he still slept with another woman.”
“Have you asked him why?” Maddie asked.
Dana Sue shook her head. “I’m not sure I want to know. What difference would it make, anyway?”
“It might reassure you that it had nothing to do with you,” Maddie said.
“He was my husband. I’d say it had a lot to do with me,” Dana Sue said, her tone sarcastic.
“I meant that it might not have been about you at all. Sometimes men just lose their heads for a minute and do something incredibly stupid.”
“And that makes it okay?”
“Of course not. But do you give up on your marriage because of it any more than you would give up on your marriage because one of you wrecked the car?”
Dana Sue frowned at her. “It’s hardly the same.”
Maddie sighed. “I’m not explaining this very well. All I’m suggesting is that to Ronnie that one-night stand might have held no more long-term importance than some accident that smashed up a car. It happened. It’s over with. No long-running affair, no emotional entanglement, the way there was with Bill and Noreen. Ronnie’s one-night stand was about sex. The other was about a relationship, a real, ongoing intimacy between two people that took away from what Bill and I shared.”
“I suppose,” Dana Sue said, not entirely convinced. “But it hurt just the same.”
“Of course it did. And it was wrong, no question about it. But, sweetie, weigh it against the big picture. Ronnie loves you with everything in him. What happened was one little blip, barely noticeable when you look back over twenty years together.” Maddie patted her hand. “Just think about it, okay? Don’t let your pride rob you of what you really want.”
“It’s not about my pride,” Dana Sue said defensively.
Maddie’s brow rose. “Isn’t it?”
Dana Sue turned away from her knowing look. “I need to check on Annie. She could be getting tired.”
“Annie’s fine,” Maddie said, gesturing toward the porch. “She’s out there with Ty, Sarah and Raylene. But we probably should get going, just the same. What time is your family counseling session in the morning?”
“Ten o’clock,” Dana Sue said. “I have to admit, I’m scared.”
“What of?”
“What’s going to come out in there,” she confessed. “What if all this turns out to be my fault?”
“I don’t think it’s about casting blame. I think it’s about moving forward so Annie won’t fall back into the same destructive pattern.”
“I know you’re right,” Dana Sue conceded.
“Then what are you really worried about?”
“Annie wants Ronnie and me back together. And right now, I would do almost anything in the world to make her happy,” Dana Sue explained. “But that?” She shook her head. “I can’t go back to Ronnie because it’s what Annie wants.”
Maddie grinned. “Maybe you should do it because it’s what
you
want.”
Before Dana Sue could protest again, Maddie pressed a kiss to her cheek. “Talk to you tomorrow. I’ll gather up my crew and get out of here. That should signal the others it’s time to go, too.”
“Thanks,” Dana Sue said gratefully.
Of course, with everyone gone there would be no one to serve as a buffer between her and Ronnie. The memory of the kiss he’d laid on her a short time before stirred her blood all over again.
But when she looked around as everyone was leaving, there was no sign of him anywhere. She glanced at Annie as she closed the front door behind the last guest.
“Where’s your dad?”
“He cleaned up the kitchen, then left,” Annie said, her expression knowing as she watched Dana Sue for a reaction. “Disappointed, Mom?”
“No, of course not,” she insisted. But she was, and that most definitely was not a good thing.
“Liar,” Annie accused with a grin. “If you’d let him move back in, he’d still be here.”
“Not an option,” Dana Sue said tersely.
“Maybe it should be,” Annie taunted. “’Night, Mom. See you in the morning.”
“Good night, sweetie. I am so glad you’re home again.”
“Me, too.”
Annie started toward the stairs, then came back and wrapped her arms around Dana Sue’s waist. “I love you. Thanks for sticking by me.”
“Always,” she answered. “No matter what.”
She just prayed there would never be another crisis like the one they’d just been through and, in the months to come, that they’d all have the strength to navigate the bumps in the road to Annie’s recovery.
Ronnie’s hasty exit the night before had been deliberate. He knew how much his kiss had rattled Dana Sue. He’d been just as shaken. He’d also known that to expect anything more right now was out of the question. Better to slip away than to make a move that would alienate her just when they were making real progress.
He’d also wanted to get a good night’s sleep before this family counseling thing. He had no idea what to expect or how much of the blame for Annie’s problems was going to come down on his head. He was prepared to accept some of the responsibility, but Dana Sue bore some of it, as well. In fact, she seemed inclined to heap all of it on her own shoulders, right along with condemning herself for her weight gain.
An hour before the appointment, he pulled into the driveway at the house, noting that the trim on the brick house was in need of a coat of paint. Maybe he could get to that this weekend. It would be yet another peace offering to Dana Sue.
The kitchen door opened and Dana Sue emerged. “You coming in?” she called.
He left the car and headed inside.
She eyed him warily as he entered. “Have you eaten? I could scramble some eggs for you.”
“No, thanks. I don’t have much appetite this morning.” He let his gaze travel over her very slowly. “Except for things I shouldn’t have.”
Her cheeks immediately turned pink. “Ronnie!”
“It’s true. I thought about that kiss all night.”
“You shouldn’t have.”
“Then you shouldn’t have made it so memorable,” he said, then deliberately changed the subject to something more neutral. “Where’s Annie?”
“Getting dressed.”
“Are you as scared about this morning as I am?” he asked, and saw a hint of relief in her eyes.
She nodded. “Crazy, isn’t it? It’s like being called to the principal’s office.”
He laughed. “I definitely know more about that than you do, but yes, it’s exactly like that.”
“I don’t think it’s supposed to be,” she said. “I mean, we’re all after the same thing, right?”
“Seems that way to me,” he agreed. “Why don’t you go hurry Annie along so we can get out of here? The sooner we’re there, the sooner it’ll be over with.”
“Good idea,” she said at once, and headed upstairs.
While she was gone, Ronnie poured himself a cup of coffee and took a long, satisfying swallow. Dana Sue still made the best coffee he’d ever tasted.