Authors: Perfect
Even now, years later, the mention of the baby she'd deliberately destroyed made Ted so furious that he had to fight the urge to slap her, and his own pent-up fury staggered him. "Don't ever mention the baby to me or anyone else again, or so help me God, I'll—"
"You'll what?" Katherine cried brokenly. "You'll hate me? You can't hate me more than I hate myself for what happened. You'll divorce me? You already did that to me. You'll refuse to believe it was an accident?" she continued hysterically. "Well, it
was
an accident! The horse I was riding went lame—"
"Damn you, shut up!" Ted said, grabbing her arms in a bruising grip and starting to shove her aside to leave, but Katherine ignored the pain of his grip and flattened herself against the door so he couldn't. "I can't!" she cried. "I have to make you understand.
I've spent three years trying to forget what I did to us,
three years looking for some way to atone for all the things I was and don't want to be."
"I don't want to hear any more of this!" He tried to yank her forward and out of his way, but she pressed against the door, ignoring the bite of his fingers into her flesh.
"What the hell do you want from me?" he demanded, unable to budge her without resorting to serious
brute force.
"I want you to believe me when I tell you it was an
accident,"
she wept.
Ted fought to ignore the impact of her words and the effect of her beautiful, tear-streaked face, but in all the time he'd known her, he'd never seen her reduced to tears. She'd been spoiled, proud, and willful, but never, ever had she shed a single tear. Even so, he might have been able to resist her if she hadn't lifted her wet eyes to his at that moment and whispered achingly, "We've both been crying inside over the way
our marriage ended for all these years, at least hold me and let's finish it now."
Against his will, his hands loosened their grip on her arms, she pressed her face against his chest, and
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suddenly his arms were going around her, holding her to him as she cried, and the sweet ache he felt at having her body pressed to his again was almost his undoing. Struggling to keep his voice flat and emotionless, he warned her, "It's over, Katherine.
We're
over."
"Then let me say the things I came back to Keaton to say to you, so we can end it as friends, not enemies." His hand stopped moving down her back and Katherine held her breath, half expecting him to refuse, but when he remained silent, she lifted her gaze to his and began, "Can you possibly find it in your
heart to believe there's at least a fifty/fifty chance I didn't deliberately try to lose our baby?" Before he could refuse, she said with painful honestly, "If you think back, you'll realize I never would have had the
courage
to risk my own life for anything. I was such a coward, I was afraid of blood, spiders, snakes—"
Ted was older now and wiser, too; he suddenly recognized the compelling logic in her statement, but more than that, he saw truth in her eyes, and the fury and disgust he'd nurtured all these years began to disintegrate, leaving him feeling incredibly relieved.
"You were even afraid of moths."
Katherine nodded, watching the animosity finally fade from his face for the first time in years. "I'm sorrier
than I can ever say for the reckless, selfish stupidity that lost us our baby. I'm sorry for the mess I made out of our marriage, for the nightmare I made out of your life the entire time we lived together—"
"It wasn't quite as bad as that," he said reluctantly,
"at least not the
entire
time."
"Don't pretend for my sake. I'm all grown up now, I've learned to face the truth and deal with it. And the
truth is I was a pitiful excuse for a wife. Besides acting like a spoiled, irrational, demanding child bride, I
was completely useless. I didn't cook, I didn't clean, and when you wouldn't give me my own way, I didn't sleep with you. For years, I've needed to admit that to you and to tell you the truth—our marriage didn't fail, you didn't fail—I failed."
To her amazement, he shook his head and sighed.
"You were always so damned hard on yourself. That hasn't changed."
"Hard on myself?" Katherine repeated with a choked laugh. "You must be joking, or else you've had two child brides! In case you're confused,
I'm
the one who nearly poisoned you on the rare occasions I bothered to cook. I'm the one who scorched an imprint of an iron into three of your uniform shirts the
first week we were married. I'm the one who ironed creases in all the side seams of your pants, instead of the fronts, so the legs all stuck out at the sides."
"You did not nearly poison me."
"Ted, don't patronize me! All the guys in the sheriff's office used to tease you about being the Rolaid King after we got married. I heard them."
"Damn it, I was swallowing antacids like candy because I was married to someone who I couldn't make
happy, and it was tearing me up inside."
Katherine had waited all this time to confess her failures and ask his forgiveness and she refused to be held off by some misplaced notion of gallantry on Ted's part. "That's not true, and you know it! My God,
your mother even gave me her recipe for your favorite meal, and you could barely eat the goulash when I
cooked it! Don't deny it," she said fiercely when he started to shake his head. "I
saw
you throw that goulash down the disposal when I left the kitchen.
You must have been getting rid of everything else I cooked the same way, and I don't blame you."
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"Damn it, I ate everything you ever cooked for me,"
he insisted angrily. "Except for the goulash. I'm sorry you saw me get rid of it, but I can't stomach that stuff."
Katherine's expression turned ominous at his continued prevarication. "Ted, your mother specifically told
me it was your favorite."
"No, it was
Carl's
favorite. She always got that mixed up."
The absurdity of the heated debate hit them both at the same time; it made Katherine giggle and slump back against the door. "Why didn't you tell me that then?"
"You wouldn't have believed me," Ted said with a harsh sigh as he braced his hand beside her shoulder and tried to explain to her one more time what he hadn't been able to make her understand when she was
a twenty-year-old. "Sometime in your young life as Dillon Cahill's beautiful, intelligent daughter, you got
the crazy idea that you had to do everything exactly by the book and do it better than anyone else. When you couldn't excel at something, you got so angry and ashamed there was no reasoning with you. To you,
life was like one of those paint-by-number canvases, where everything had to be done in exactly the right order and right between the lines or else it was no good. Kathy," he said quietly, and the sound of the nickname that he alone had ever dared to use was almost as devastating to her as the way he absently brushed her hair off her shoulder with his wrist, "you wanted to go to college right after we got married, not because you were shallow or spoiled, but because you had some crazy notion that you'd screwed up
the rightful order of things by marrying me first instead of after you got your education at that fancy eastern school. And when you wanted that damned mansion your father built for us, it wasn't because you wanted to lord it over everyone in town, it was because in some part of you, you truly believed we'd be happy there because … because it fell into your notion of the natural order of things for Katherine Cahill."
Closing her eyes, Katherine leaned her head against the door and sighed with a mixture of frustration and amusement. "When I went back to college, after our divorce, I spent an entire year seeing a therapist once a week, trying to understand why I was such a mess."
"What did you find out?"
"Not nearly as much as what you just told me in two minutes. And then do you know what I did next?"
A smile tugged at his lips and he shook his head. "I couldn't begin to imagine. What did you do next?"
"I went to Paris and took a Cordon Bleu cooking course!"
"How did you do?"
"Not well, actually," she told him with a rueful smile. "It's the only time in my life I didn't shine in a course
I
wanted
to take." He lifted his brows to emphasize the importance of her revealing remark, and she accepted his silent comment with a nod of understanding.
"Did you pass the course?"
"I passed beef," she teased, and his chuckle made her heart sing, "but I failed veal."
For a long moment they smiled at each other, in accord for the first time in years, and then Katherine said softly, "Will you please kiss me?"
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He straightened abruptly, shoving away from the door. "Not a chance."
"Are you afraid?"
"Knock it off, damn it! You already ran this seduction number on me years ago, and it's old stuff now. It
won't work."
Ignoring the blow to her pride, she crossed her arms over her chest and smiled at him. "For a minister's son, you swear an awful lot."
"So you told me years ago. And as I told you, I'm no minister, my father is. Furthermore," he added with a deliberate attempt to alienate her, "while you were undeniably appealing to me when I was younger, I prefer to do my own seducing these days."
Katherine's wounded pride came out in a soft, ominous whisper as she shoved away from the door and
reached for the coat she tossed over a chair.
"Do
you now?"
"You're damned right I do. And now, if you'll take some good advice, you'll go running back to Dallas to
Hayward Spencer or Spencer Hayward or whatever his name is and let him soothe your wounded sensibilities with a fifty-carat diamond necklace to match that incredibly vulgar ring you're wearing."
Instead of tearing into him as she would have years ago, she gave him an indecipherable look and said,
"I don't need your advice any more. It may surprise you to hear this, but people, including Spencer, actually ask me for advice these days."
"On what?" he jeered. "Making a fashion statement in the society pages?"
"That does it!" Katherine exploded, throwing her coat back on the chair. "I'll let you hurt me when I deserve it, but I'll be damned if I'll let you hide your sexual uncertainties behind an attack on me."
"My WHAT?" he exploded.
"You were perfectly nice, perfectly at ease, until I asked you to kiss me and then you started this absurd
personal attack. Now, either apologize or kiss me or admit you're afraid."
"I apologize," he snapped, so quickly and so completely unrepentantly that Katherine started to laugh.
"Thank you," she said sweetly, reaching for her coat.
"I accept your apology."
In the past such an exchange would have ended in a royal battle, and Ted was completely taken aback by her new serenity, so much so that he realized that she really had changed. "Katherine," he said shortly,
"I apologize for attacking you. I mean it. I'm sorry."
She nodded but carefully kept her eyes from his so they wouldn't give her away. "I know. You probably misunderstood the sort of kiss I was asking you for. I only thought of it as a way to seal our truce and make it lasting."
She raised her eyes to his and could have sworn there was amusement and knowledge in his gaze, but to
her shock, he complied. Tipping her chin up he murmured, "All right. Kiss me, but make it quick."
Which
was why Katherine was laughing and his mouth was smiling when their lips touched for the first time in
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three years. "Stop laughing," he warned in a muffled chuckle.
"Stop smiling," she countered, but their breaths were mingling and it took only that to ignite the passion they'd shared years before. Ted's hands slid to her waist, moving her closer, then tightened suddenly as she flattened herself against his body, sweeping around her back and yanking her tightly to him.
The directions she'd been given by the man at the rental car office at Ridgemont's small airport, Julie had
no trouble finding Zack's boyhood home. Perched high on a hill overlooking the picturesque little valley,
the Tudor mansion where Margaret Stanhope still lived was, according to the man at the rental car office,
"practically a landmark hereabouts." Watching for the fancy brick pillars that she'd been told would mark
the driveway, Julie saw them on her left and turned off the highway. As she wended her way up the long wide drive that climbed through the trees to the top of the hill, she remembered what Zack had told her about the day he'd left this place.
"I was permanently
disowned as of that moment. I handed over
my car keys and walked down the driveway and
down the hill to the highway."
He'd had a very long walk, she realized with a pang of sad nostalgia, looking around her, trying to imagine what he had felt and seen that day.
At the top of the hill as she made the last turn, the drive widened and swept in a wide arc through manicured lawns and giant trees, barren now in winter. There was a harsh austerity about the sprawling
stone house that made her oddly uneasy as she pulled to a stop on the brick-paved entry in front of the
steps. She hadn't called in advance because she hadn't wanted to explain the purpose for her visit on a
telephone, nor had she wanted to give Zack's grandmother an easy opportunity to refuse to see her.
In
Julie's experience, delicate personal matters were always better handled in person. Gathering up her purse and gloves, she got out of the car and stopped, looking around at the house and its setting, delaying the moment of reckoning. Zack had grown up here, and it seemed to her this place had left its mark on his personality; it was like him in a way—
formidable, proud, solid, impressive.
That made her feel better, braver, as she walked up the steps toward the wide arched door. Firmly suppressing the inexplicable premonition of doom that was trying to steal over her, she reminded herself