Because a Husband Is Forever (15 page)

“Well, glad we could help beef up your clientele,” she responded glibly.

Randy, held in check by typical New York gridlock, finally made it to the studio and joined them for the last fifteen minutes of the segment.

The segment ran over, but not as long as the last time. Going to commercial, she nodded genially at the two men as the director led them off the stage. Several women in the audience vocalized their disappointment.

Get in line, she thought, keeping her sunny smile in place. She congratulated herself on pulling the segment off without breaking. She didn't want anyone knowing just how personal the relationship between her and Ian
had gotten, least of all, Ian. If he was going to handle this as if it had all been business as usual, well, damn it, so could she.

Besides, it was her fault for letting herself get carried away, not his.

She felt as if this had been the longest show of her career, but finally it was over. Waving at the audience, Dakota withdrew. There was no way she was going to face another question-and-answer period. Not today.

As she walked off the set, she saw Ian coming out of the producer's office. He was pocketing an envelope. Randy was nowhere in sight.

Ian looked right at her, killing any hope of making a quick, unobserved getaway. So she approached him. “I thought he already paid you.”

His tongue felt as if it was tying itself in a knot in his mouth. Ian tapped his inside pocket. “This was a bonus.”

Her eyebrows drew together. She didn't remember hearing anything about a bonus. Did Alan think she was that hard to work with?

“For what?” she asked. “For putting up with me?”

The shrug was careless, noncommittal. He'd turned down the extra money, but Randy had said it could go toward expanding the firm. He deferred to Randy's judgment. “The show's ratings were the highest you've had all year. He just wanted to show his gratitude.”

“How honest of him.”

God, that sounded so stilted, she upbraided herself. Why did she feel so awkward with a man she'd made
love with? Why couldn't she be a love-'em-and-leave-'em type? Men fantasized about women like that. They didn't fantasize about women who wanted to be domestic or at least partially domestic. She needed to not put her heart into the mix when she dated.

But that wasn't her style.

Frustrated, at a loss for words for possibly the first time in her life, Dakota sank her hands into her pockets. There was nothing left to do but tie up the ends. “Well, I guess we'd better get back to my place so you can pack your things.”

He shook his head, giving no indication that he was going anywhere. “There's no need. I already packed everything.”

“When?”

Confusion worked its way through her. They had made love last night until the wee hours of today and then they'd fallen asleep in her bed. Granted, he wasn't there when she woke up this morning, but the strong aroma of coffee coming from the kitchen had told her that he'd left her side to make it for her. Just the way she liked it. As black as pitch and twice as strong.

“Early this morning.”

Something twisted in her heart. He couldn't wait to make his getaway, she thought. All right, if that was the way it was going to be, she could handle it. She'd survived worse things.

She started to head toward her dressing room to get her purse. “I guess we'll go and pick it up, then.”

“No need.” His words stopped her in her tracks. “My suitcase is already in my car.”

He was trying to break all ties with her as quickly as possible. Why wasn't she attempting to save face by walking away? Why was she just standing here, making offers that were being rejected even as he was rejecting her?

She caught her lower lip between her teeth, then asked, “Would you like a lift?” As usual, they'd driven over to the studio in her car this morning. The trip had been mostly in silence.

“Randy's going to take me over to your parking garage. He's talking to MacKenzie right now,” he added.

He had an answer for everything, Dakota thought. It was time to pick up her marbles and go home.

“Okay, then I guess there's nothing left to do but say goodbye.” Forcing a smile to her lips, she put out her hand to him.

It was better this way, he told himself. Better for her. Because she deserved someone who could give her what she needed. He couldn't. He'd failed at marriage, and she wanted happily ever after, something he obviously couldn't do. She wanted words, and he was inarticulate. That wasn't remotely compatible. Better to go now and not compound the mistakes he'd already allowed himself to commit.

Nodding, Ian took the hand she offered and shook it. “Guess not. Goodbye.”

The smile on her lips lasted only long enough for her
to release his hand and turn away from him. With hurried steps she managed to duck into her dressing room before the tears that stung her eyes had a chance to materialize and completely humiliate her.

In the distance she heard his heels against the tile, walking away from her.

I
t wasn't changing. Wasn't lessening, wasn't getting even the smallest bit better. The sadness refused to go away.

The apartment still felt like an empty cavern to her. When she'd broken up with John, after her initial anger and hurt had a chance to settle down, a wave of relief had followed. The kind of relief that came when a big mistake had been averted at the eleventh hour.

In her heart she knew that John wasn't the man she wanted to spend forever with. Even when she'd said yes to him, there had been that tiniest bit of doubt in the back of her mind, that desire to pull back and hold fast to “no.” She'd just thought she was getting cold feet way
ahead of schedule, but it had turned out to be a premonition. Ultimately he hadn't been the one for her.

It was different now.

The curtain had gone down on her and Ian, but the relief she expected to finally materialize refused to come. The sadness that had been her companion waking and sleeping refused to let relief even sit at the table.

So, she threw herself into things, made sure she was as busy as any three human beings could possibly be. By the time she crossed the threshold to her darkened apartment each evening, she was several steps beyond exhausted.

But even so, every night, before she took off her coat or even shed her shoes, she instantly went to the answering machine. When the light blinked seductively at her, her heart would jump and a prayer would explode in her brain as she hoped against hope that Ian had finally called.

Night after night it was the same thing.

His voice wasn't on the machine.

Her grandfather, serving as an emcee for an award program that was being televised both in L.A. and New York, dropped by for a visit the third week into her Ian-free life. She greeted the older man's presence with the joy she always did.

And couldn't help thinking that Ian would have liked to meet him.

Everything brought back thoughts of Ian to her. One would have thought she'd spent a lifetime with him instead of only two weeks. Somehow two weeks were enough.

And not nearly enough.

“If you frown like that, your face'll freeze, Baby Cakes,” Waylon Montgomery had said to her, using the nickname he'd given her at the age of four when cup-cakes had been her food of choice. “Who's the guy?”

She'd insisted that her grandfather stay at her apartment, the way he always did when he came to town. They'd been getting ready for the Award Program at the time he'd sprung his question. She'd looked at him innocently. “What guy?”

He'd raised her chin with the crook of his finger. “Can't fool a fooler, Baby Cakes. Your mama had the same look in her eyes when she fell for your dad. Who is he and do I need to have a talk with him?”

“Nobody you know and no, you don't. He's out of my life.”

He'd eyed her and she'd turned away, afraid he would see the sadness in her soul. “By choice?”

“Yes.”

He let her finish fixing his tie. It had been her official job since she was eight. “Well, if that's the case, then he's an idiot and you're better off without him.”

She only wished she'd believe that.

Her grandfather came and went. And the sadness continued, burrowing in deeper by the day. She began to think of it as a way of life. Forcing a smile to her face when she faced her friends and the audience was more and more difficult.

“Damn it,” she said now to the reflection in the mir
ror as she wiped away a smudge she'd created with her eyeshadow wand, “It's been over a month. He's not coming back, not calling. Grow up, already.”

She heard the door behind her opening and glanced up, a dismissal on her lips. The only one who walked in unannounced like that was MacKenzie. They were close enough for her friend to endure the moods she showed no one else.

“Go away, I'm trying to get my audience mood in gear, and it's not working.” By her watch, she had ten minutes to get rid of the foul mood and become her former perky self.

“I thought that came naturally to you.”

The brush she was about to apply to her cheeks slipped from her suddenly lax fingers, clattering to the table before rolling off and onto the floor.

Dakota swung around on her chair, certain that she was hallucinating. After all, the man's presence persistently littered her dreams every single night and twice on Sundays.

He was there, in the doorway, larger than life and three times as good-looking. The air in the dressing room became dangerously thin. She couldn't take her eyes off him. He wasn't fading, wasn't disappearing.

“Ian?”

He eased the door closed behind him. Like a man standing in the middle of a field filled with land mines, he debated the wisdom of taking a step. “You say that as if you expect me to rip a mask off my face and become someone else.”

Dakota realized that she had to remind herself to breathe. She struggled to keep from flinging herself into his arms. On the flip side, that same restraint kept her from giving in to the impulse of strangling him with her bare hands.

“Maybe,” she allowed tentatively. She pressed her lips together to keep any unauthorized squeals from escaping. He was here, he was really here, standing in her dressing room.

Why?

She forced the question to her lips. “What are you doing here? Did you forget something?”

He felt awkward, like a fish that found it had feet and could walk on land. It still didn't make it easy. “Yeah, I did.”

Same old Ian, she thought. Getting something out of him was like pulling teeth. She was prepared to extract every one in his mouth if she had to. He'd come to her, not she to him. “What?”

“How to take a chance.”

An impatient sigh didn't escape her lips, she pushed it out. “I'm sorry, but I don't understand.”

That made two of them. He hadn't been able to understand anything since the day he'd walked into her apartment, least of all himself.

“Neither do I, really,” he admitted. Ian looked at the padded chair on the side. “Mind if I sit down?”

Yes, I mind. I mind you coming in here after an entire silent, awful month, acting as if nothing ever hap
pened between us, as if my heart hasn't been cracking and breaking the whole time. Damn it, how could you have walked out on me like that?

Not a single thought was evident on her face as she kept the expression her grandfather had taught her to wear whenever she played cards and nodded toward the chair. “Knock yourself out.”

Ian perched on the edge of the chair, looking as uncomfortable as someone sitting on red-hot coals.

Small talk was not something he indulged in, but for now it seemed like a way of trying to smooth out the rough waves between them. “I saw you on that award show last week. Your grandfather still looks the way he did when he was on
Savage Ben.
”

He didn't add that seeing her on the small screen had brought a flood of feelings back, nearly drowning him in them. That since he'd walked out of this studio, he had been struggling every single day to keep his head above water, to swim away from his feelings for her. None of it had worked.

She nodded. They were talking like two strangers, she thought. And maybe, despite the lovemaking, they were. Because the man she'd thought she'd fallen in love with never would have left her to mark time alone in this living hell she found herself in.

“I'll tell him you said that.” She forced herself to focus on her grandfather. “It'll make him feel good.”

“Good,” he echoed, nodding.

Why was he here? Why had he come back? To tor
ture her? To see if she was functioning without him? She drew herself up, determined to make him believe that she was doing just fine.

“Okay, I don't have time for this. I've got to go on in a few minutes, why are you here?”

He didn't answer directly. “I just got in an hour ago. I was on the West Coast.”

Dakota pressed her lips together. Okay, since he didn't look any the worse for wear, she could pretend his being here in this small space wasn't driving her crazy. “Business?”

He stared down at his hands. Since when had his courage flagged like this? But then he realized that it took more courage to walk back into this dressing room than it did to chase an armed killer down a darkened alley. “Pleasure, actually.”

Dakota fixed him with a stony look. “What does this have to do with me?”

Because it seemed as if everything in his life these days had something to do with her, he thought. “I was there because of you.”

He was going to tell her about another woman. She rose to her feet, ready to usher him out before she said something she couldn't take back. Crossing to the door, she threw it open. “Glad to hear that I helped you learn to unwind, but—”

He made no move to rise to his feet, never took his eyes off her. “I went to see Scottie, the way you suggested.” The surprised look on her face was priceless.
Dakota slowly closed the door again and retraced her steps to the dressing table, never taking her eyes off him. “Marla didn't look too happy to see me, but I made her understand that it was good for Scottie to have some kind of contact with me once in a while. To know that his father loved him and was thinking about him.”

Words she'd said to him. So he had been listening after all. Dakota nodded. “I'm glad you did that,” she said. More than words could express. She'd ached for Scottie when Ian had told her that his ex-wife had made it clear she didn't want him seeing the boy. Ached for Scottie and for him.

“Yeah, so am I. He's a really great kid,” he said in a voice that fathers had been using to brag about their sons since the beginning of time. “We spent two weeks together. I even took him fishing. Him and Brian.”

“Brian?”

“The man Marla married.” It felt odd talking about his ex-wife's husband. Maybe he had come a long way in a short time, he thought. And if he had, it was all because of Dakota. “Brian's a pretty decent guy. He and Scottie like each other and get along.”

Finding out that his son was well adjusted, that his son still loved him, had loosened a huge knot he'd been carrying around in his gut.

Restless, he rose again to stand over her. He slipped his hands into his back pockets, then pulled them out again, as if he didn't know what to do with them. With himself. And wouldn't until he finally said what he'd come to say.

Ian tried again. “Look, I botched up my first marriage.”

“Usually takes two to botch.”

He shrugged. “Maybe that's so, but I had the lion's share.” A disparaging smile played along his lips as he looked at her. “You might have noticed that I don't communicate too well.”

It took effort not to laugh. He had the gift of understatement, she'd give him that. “Yes, I noticed.”

He felt like a man running to catch the last train out of the station before it departed and left him stranded. He'd been stranded far too long. He didn't want to be any longer. “But I can work on it.”

A strange peacefulness began to descend over her. “Admirable goal. You do realize this requires that you give more than an occasional grunt in response.”

“Yes, I realize that.” He began to pace, then caught himself at it and stopped. “I also realize that I can't go back.”

“To see Scottie?”

“No, to what there was before.” His eyes searched hers, as if he was willing her to understand. “Because there wasn't anything before.”

Far from understanding, Dakota felt as if she was sinking hip deep into a bog. Either she'd missed something, or he was getting things very, very garbled. She opted for the latter. “You still have a long way to go about learning how to use words to their best capacity.”

Ian took a breath. It was all or nothing. “Okay, how's this? I don't like my life without you.”

Now
that
she could understand. Dakota didn't even try to keep the wide smile from her lips. “I'd say you just went to the head of the remedial speech class with a very good chance of acing the final.”

He took her hands in his, drawing her to him. “My life feels hollow without you.”

There was her heart, taking that all-too-familiar trip up to her throat again. Breathing was becoming a challenge. “Excellent.”

“And I love you.” There, they were out, the fatal words that bound him to her.

This time it took her almost a full minute to drag air back into her lungs. Her heart beat wildly. “Very good,” she whispered, her voice almost cracking from the weight of emotion.

“Will you stop grading me, Dakota, and tell me I'm not making a fool of myself?”

She could only parrot what he said. “You're not making a fool of yourself.”

A warmth began to spread through his limbs. He'd made it, made it out of his lonely hovel of an existence, and crossed the chasm to hers. “And that you feel something, too.”

She couldn't focus, couldn't think, could only feel. And it was wonderful. “And I feel something, too.”

“Dakota—”

Humor danced in her blue eyes. She could have sworn that she was having an out-of-body experience. The only extraneous thing she felt was the cameo. It felt
as if it was glowing against her flesh. “A whole lot of somethings,” she told him.

He shook his head, rejecting the paltry offering. “Too nebulous. Words, woman, give me words. You're the one who knows how to use them.”

She laughed. “And yet, suddenly, I'm tongue-tied.”

“Look, I know this is a lot to spring on you all of a sudden like this, but—”

If he was going to take it back, she didn't want to hear it. Dakota placed her finger against his lips. Stopped midword, he looked at her in surprise.

“No, it's not. I'm just surprised, that's all. It's been a whole month, Ian. You didn't call, you didn't write, there wasn't even a carrier pigeon on my windowsill. Thirty-two days, nothing.”