Authors: Liz Talley
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
K
ARA
'
S
BAG
WAS
packed, and the little girl was sound asleep in her princess bed, covers tucked up to her chin, hugging Sammy.
Maddie had long since gone home. On Friday nights she liked to stay up to watch old movies on some cable station with the younger girls. Gwen, the woman who stayed at Maddie's place while her husband worked, was off for the night.
Lynn didn't even hesitate before pouring herself a glass of wine and heading to her bathroom. The rose-scented candle was already there. As was the bottle of rose-scented bubble bath. Turning on her portable music player, she found her CD of Pachelbel's Canon renditions, stripped down and stepped into the still-running water.
She could do all that was expected of her, do all that she expected of herself; she could contribute to society and be happy, too. She just had to make certain that she maintained control of her heart and, thus, her life.
The warm water sluiced around her ankles as she stood naked in the tub and bent to adjust the water temperature. A tepid bath wasn't going to do it tonight.
She needed enough external heat to melt away the lava burning through her veins.
It wasn't like her to be so emotional. But as hard as she tried not to allow herself to wallow, she was angry with Brandon for breaking his promises to herâfor asking her to share his life with him and then changing her life so drastically.
She was illogically jealous of Douglas, who was able to attract her ex-husband when she couldn't.
She was worried about letting Kara go off with her father to another city overnight.
And she was so turned on by Grant Bishop that the following morning loomed amid a mass of anticipation and fantasy....
At first she thought the ringing was coming from her music player. By the second ring, she'd jumped out of the tub and grabbed her phone off the bathroom counter.
Being on call 24/7 meant she could never have more than one glass of wine. And could never be far from her cell phone.
“This is Lynn,” she said, pushing the answer button without looking at the LED screen.
“Is this a bad time?”
Pleasant shivers suffusing her body as she slid back down into the water, Lynn said, “No, it's fine. What's up?”
Darin called Maddie at night because he liked her. Did Grant's call mean that he liked Lynn, too?
The thought was followed quickly by another. He was calling to cancel their appointment in the morning....
She took a gulp of wine. Set the stem of the glass carefully on the edge of the tub.
“How does a double date sound?”
“I'm not sure what you mean.”
“Darin wants to take Maddie on a date.”
“You prevaricated, right? Led him down another path.”
“I... Not successfully.”
“So you're thinking we should let them go, but go with them?”
“I'm saying I have to help him take Maddie on a date and I'm asking you if you would like to accompany me.”
Oh. But... The wine was too good going down.
“You want us to be on a date, though.”
His hesitation was sexy. And worrisome, too. What if he didn't want to date her but felt he had to? What if he was only asking her for Maddie's sake? What if he'd asked her because he thought doing so was the only way The Lemonade Stand would agree to let Maddie go on the date?
Maddie didn't need their permission to go. She wasn't a prisoner at the Stand.
“I want to emasculate my older brother as little as possible.” Grant's belated answer was offered softly.
“You want Darin and Maddie to think we're on a date with them.”
“I want it to be a date.”
Oh, boy. She needed to not be naked in the bath at the moment. Covering her pubic area with her hand, as though she could stem the flow of feeling down there, and shield that part of her from a man who saw far too much, she said, “When?”
“Tomorrow night. That's why I'm calling tonight. Otherwise, we could have talked about this in the morning.”
Right, so he was still coming in the morning. Good.
“My thinking is to get this done as quickly as possible,” he said. “I don't want the date to build into something bigger than it is.”
Was he talking about them? Or Maddie and Darin?
“And Kara's going to be gone tomorrow night.”
Maddie was her usual sitter, but not her only one. Occasionally, when Maddie was otherwise engaged, other residents watched over Kara for her.
“Okay.”
“Really? Just like that?”
She sipped again. Pushed water up over her nipples, stimulating them further. “Yeah, I think so, just like that.”
It made logical sense. Put the elephant on the table. Take the bull by the horns. Face the issue.
“Great, then. I'll plan something. Unless you'd rather...”
“No, you go ahead.” Mistake. Mistake. Mistake. She used to love it when Brandon surprised her with a special night out, when he took care of the details. She'd felt spoiled. Cared for.
And she'd been left bereft when the details he'd taken care of had no longer included her.
She been brokenhearted, too, but hearts mended. It was the way the life one was building could be completely deleted without warning, when one allowed one's life to be tightly woven with the wants and needs of another, that had nearly killed her.
It was that joining of hearts and lives that she would never again allow.
But she could date. Have sex. Be friends.
Grant asked about her culinary likes and dislikes. She told him Maddie's, too. He asked if she liked the beach. She told him she and Maddie both liked the beach.
He wanted to know her taste in music. She told him about Pachelbel, happening to mention that she was listening to him right then. And added, “Maddie likes country music.”
“You're listening to Pachelbel?”
Scooping more water over her breasts, she reached for her wineglass and said, “Mmm-hmm.”
“Is that water I hear?”
She'd tried to keep her activities quiet. Until that last time. She'd forgotten.
Taking a sip of wine, she allowed a drop to spill onto her breast. Watched it trickle into the water and set her glass back on the porcelain edge. “I don't know, probably,” she said.
“You listen to Pachelbel while you do dishes?”
“I'm not doing dishes.”
His pause was quite lengthy. She dipped her hand in the water and wiped the wine off her nipple.
And dipped her hand in the water again, not even trying to be quiet about it.
“You're in the bathtub.”
“Mmm-hmm.”
“You leave me no choice but to picture you there.”
“I'm under bubbles. All you'd see is white.”
“Completely?”
Slipping down farther into the water, she concentrated on keeping her phone dry. “Yes.”
“Too bad.”
Yeah, well, a girl had to do what it took to save herself from mental and emotional breakdown.
“I meant what I said.” His voice had dropped down to a very quiet but powerful tenor. “Tomorrow night is a real date.”
But he'd only asked because of Darin and Maddie.
“Okay,” she said, and left the phone beside the tub after they hung up, pretending he was still there as she let the hot water touch her body and fantasized about what he looked like naked.
* * *
G
RANT
HEARD
D
ARIN
moving about just before he crawled into bed Friday night and, pulling on a pair of boxers, walked in to find his brother at the computer, playing a game of solitaire.
It was an exercise his occupational therapist had recommended years ago. One that Darin struggled to complete with any accuracy.
“I haven't seen you play that in a while.” Was this what Darin did at night? Kept trying to succeed where he'd failed? Grant had thought his brother had given up on ever getting solitaire right.
“I was wrong to quit,” Darin said now. “Quitters never get anywhere.” He sounded like himself at fourteen, going out for the high school baseball team.
And again Grant was struck by the sudden changes in Darin. If having a girlfriend was going to have this kind of effect on Darin, then Grant had to do what he could to encourage the situation.
At the same time, he had to maintain enough control that no one got hurt. Because while Maddie and Darin could experience adult emotions, they were unable to discern between what was doable and not, what was good for them and not. They were both unable to see pitfalls that a normal adult would get from the start.
“I've got some good news,” Grant said, watching as Darin moved an ace up to the plateau to place it on a two of the same suit, rather than moving it up to the home four and adding the two on top of it.
At least he was putting the right denominations on the right suit.
“What good news?” Darin asked, trying to put a king up where the aces were supposed to stack.
“If Maddie says yes to a date, we can go.”
His brother turned around so swiftly he knocked his mouse to the floor. His mouth hanging wide-open, he stared at Grant.
And Grant wondered, for one horrible, shameful second, how any woman would want to go out with a grown man who didn't always swallow his spit.
Then he thought of Maddie. Who also drooled on occasion when she was talking or eating.
And he remembered sitting at his mother's grave site after all the cars had pulled away, remembered Darin coming to find him and sitting with him there. Just sitting. Until Grant had been able to get up and leave his mother so irrevocably behind.
“Grant?”
He blinked.
“I said she said yes.”
He tuned Darin out sometimes. Especially when his brother was jabbering like a little kid. But he wouldn't have missed a phone call.
“How do you know?”
“I already asked her.”
“When?”
“Today. When you were loading up the truck after I didn't get to see her after therapy. We don't know when we'll get to walk together again since you want to watch my therapy and she's busy at the day care and Lynn needs her, so I said we should go on a date because then we could spend the whole time together on purpose.”
Grant grinned. His brother had taken control of the situation. “Well, call her back and tell her it's tomorrow night,” he said. He felt like whooping right along with his brother.
Instead, he left the room, shutting the door firmly behind him when Darin picked up his phone.
* * *
“H
I
,
M
ISTER
,
WHATCHA
DOIN
'?”
Grant looked up from the narrow trench where he'd been busy burying an electrical line and was greeted by a pudgy little face topped by reddish-brown curls. Kara's big blue eyes glinted with curiosity.
“Putting lights in your yard so you can see out here, even at night.”
In jeans, a T-shirt and tennis shoes, Kara was obviously dressed for her flight later that morning.
“Mama said you was stalling. She said I bettaw not get in the way.”
“It would seem that you don't listen all that well, young lady.” The soft feminine voice, accompanied by a chuckle, came from behind Grant. “And I said he was
in
stalling the lights.” Running her fingers through the little girl's curls, Lynn met his gaze. “Darin said to tell you that he finished putting the bulbs in all the lights.”
It was the first time she'd looked him in the eye all morning. They'd hadn't shared more than a brief hello since he and Darin had arrived almost two hours before.
After having Darin help him by holding chalk lines and tape measures, he'd left his brother out front where there was a stoop for him to sit on as he worked at putting the plastic pieces of the light fixtures together.
Darin was about to drive him crazy that morning with talk about his date. In his excitement he'd reverted to repeating himself over and over again, and then laughing when he realized what he was doing.
“I gave him some lemonade and came out to ask if you wanted some.”
She licked her lips and he swore she was doing it on purpose to drive him crazy.
Her eyes didn't mention lemonade at all.
And he started to get hard.
In jeans and a white blouse she looked young and fresh...and he could see through her blouse. Her bra had lace on it.
He was going out with that bra, or one like it, in just a matter of hours.
“I'm going to Daddy's house,” Kara said. Lynn's smile faded. And Grant saw a flash of some deep emotion in her gaze before she looked away, saying, “That's him now, sweetie. Why don't you run and tell Daddy hello?”
Grant wasn't going to look across the grassy expanse to the sidewalk leading back to Lynn's bungalow. He wasn't going to intrude on this morning's private goings-on.
With one last glance at Grant, Lynn turned and followed her daughter. He watched her go in spite of himself.
When Kara and Lynn reached Lynn's ex-husband they were too far away for him to hear what was said but he didn't miss the way Kara threw herself at the man. And the way he picked up his daughter, giving her a hug and a kiss, and then leaned forward to give her mother a kiss, too.
The bastard was wearing golf shorts, a polo shirt and deck shoes. His hair was stylishly short and he had a gold watch on his wrist.
He was smiling like a man who loved his family.
The family he'd walked out on.
Resentment flared within him. He'd never have that chance. Never know what it was like to greet his wife and child. To have the right to touch and kiss a woman any time of the day or night. He'd never wanted it before, either.