Loving Jessie (9 page)

“Jessie wants a baby.” Matt had no idea where the
words had come from. He didn’t want to talk about Jessie’s insane request. Didn’t want to think about it. Out the corner of his eye, he saw Gabe look at him, his brows raised in inquiry.

“Oh?”

“She wants me to be the father.”

At another time he might have been amused to see his unflappable older brother’s jaw literally drop open, but his sense of humor wasn’t really in prime working order at the moment.

“You want to run that by me again?” Gabe asked after a moment.

“She wants me to play stud,” Matt said bluntly. “I guess I should be flattered.” He knotted his hands in the fabric of the shirt he held, twisting it viciously tight. “Hell, it’s practically a dream come true. I get her pregnant and then just walk away. Don’t get many offers like that these days.”

Gabe shook his head slowly. “No, not very many.” He slanted his brother an unreadable glance. “You going to do it?”

“What?” Matt’s head jerked around, his electric-blue eyes wide with shock. “Are you nuts? Do you think I could just walk away from Jessie if she was carrying my baby? Or walk away from my kid at all?”

“No.” Gabe frowned at the peeling paint on the back door. “Of course, you could always make a counteroffer.”

“A counteroffer? This isn’t a freaking corporate merger.” He heard threads pop as he pulled at the shirt wrapped around his hands. “She wants me to knock her up, goddammit!”

“What do you want?”

The quiet question caught Matt off guard. What
did
he
want? Unbidden, the image of Jessie, swollen with his child, flashed through his mind. It was powerful and so completely unexpected that his breath caught in his throat.

“I’ve known her since she was a kid,” he said, not sure if he meant it as a protest or a defense.

“She’s not a kid anymore, Matt, and I saw the way you looked at her at the party.”

“I didn’t look at her in any particular way,” Matt muttered.

“And when Reilly was dancing with her, you looked like you wanted to deck him,” Gabe continued, gently ruthless.

Remembering, Matt didn’t try to argue. “It wasn’t… appropriate,” he said, aware that the protest sounded embarrassingly prissy. But, dammit, it hadn’t been appropriate. What the hell right did Reilly have to put his hands all over Jessie, especially when she felt…well, whatever the hell she felt for him? He wondered what Gabe would say if he told him that Jessie was in love with another man, that she was offering her body to him when she’d already given her heart to his best friend?

“So what are you suggesting?” he asked, turning his head to glare at his brother in the sharp glow of the halogen light. “You think I should give her what she wants? A baby?
My
baby?”

“I don’t think you should do anything at all,” Gabe said, shaking his head. “I just think you should take a long, hard look at what you really want before you make any decisions.”

“God, I hate it when you do that inscrutable philosopher routine,” Matt exploded. There was a rending tear, and he threw the ruined shirt out into the darkness.

“You’re too goddamned tall to be Confucius. If you’ve got an opinion, just spit it out.”

Gabe straightened away from the rail. “Sorry. My license as an inscrutable philosopher prohibits me from having an opinion.” He pulled open the screen door. “Just think about what you really want, Matt.”

He went into the house, leaving Matt to glare at the closed door. Think about what he wanted? How the hell was
he
supposed to know what he wanted?

Jessie slept poorly the night after her dinner with Matt. She couldn’t stop running their conversation through her head, going over every word, thinking of all the things she could have said,
should
have said. She had been so focused on what she wanted, on her desire to have a baby, that she hadn’t given any thought at all to how Matt might feel about the child they would create between them. It wasn’t the loss of her own dream that bothered her but the emotions she’d seen in Matt’s eyes. She hadn’t just made him angry, she’d hurt him.

She was pale and heavy-eyed when she dragged herself out of bed. She showered, and pulled on a pair of pink shorts and a sleeveless white blouse in deference to the heat. Sackcloth and ashes would have better suited her mood, she thought, as she twisted her hair into a French braid. Just what was sackcloth, anyway? And what did you do with the ashes? It was the kind of question she might have asked Matt and he would have laughed and told her that she thought too much, and then, in a few days, he would have shown up with an answer that he’d tracked down in an encyclopedia or gotten someone at the news bureau to find for him. Which brought her full circle to Matt, she thought, her stomach hollowing with pain.

Ordinarily she would have tidied the kitchen before she went to bed, no matter how late the hour, but last night she hadn’t been able to face the task after Matt left. This morning she welcomed the dirty dishes and cluttered counters. She only wished the rote tasks didn’t leave her so much room to think.

Heartsick, she thought, as she loaded the dishwasher and washed the counters. She’d never really understood what the word meant, but that was what she’d felt when she watched Matt walk out the door—a sick aching in her heart. The last thing she’d meant to do was hurt him, but she’d managed to do a damn fine job of it nevertheless. She had to talk to him, had to try and make things right again, though she didn’t have a clue as to how to do it.

With the counters cleared and the dishwasher humming, Jessie debated her next move. It was barely ten o’clock in the morning. She could put in some time in her grandfather’s garden. There was always work to be done, deadheading the roses, pulling weeds that had managed to find their way up through the mulch, checking the drip lines that provided water. But the temperature was already approaching eighty, too hot for working outside, and thinking about the rose gardens made her think about her grandfather’s book, which made her think about Matt. He hadn’t given her a decision on whether or not he would be willing to do the photography. Last night probably hadn’t provided much of an incentive for him to take the job on, she thought ruefully.

And here she was thinking about Matt again. Maybe she should just drive out to his brother’s place and see him. Get it over with. The thought of seeing him again set butterflies loose in her stomach. What would she say to him? What could she possibly say? Maybe she could
tell him she’d been joking, she thought wildly. Or drunk. So what if she’d only had one glass of merlot with dinner? For all he knew, she could have spent the day tippling the Galliano that went into the cake.

Sinking down at the kitchen table, she bent to rest her forehead on the cool oak surface and wondered if she could convince Matt that she hadn’t been here at all last night, that it had really been her evil twin who’d asked him to get her pregnant.

The melodic chime of the doorbell was a welcome distraction. It was probably Mrs. Felderman from next door, come to complain about the trash truck arriving too early or too late, or about something the government had or hadn’t done. Mrs. Felderman lived to complain. For years Jessie had made it a policy to avoid the old woman as much as possible, but this morning her complaints might provide a welcome distraction, she thought, as she pulled open the door.

“Matt.” His name came out on a squeak, and Jessie cleared her throat and tried for a more normal tone. “Matt.”

“Jessie.”

He didn’t smile but simply stood there looking at her, his eyes shadowed and unreadable. He was wearing faded black jeans and a blue T-shirt that reflected the color of his eyes. She swallowed and made a conscious effort to loosen her grip on the door.

“Would you like to come in?” The invitation seemed formal and stilted, but she could hardly offer him a casual hello and throw the door open. Not after last night.

“Thanks.”

The entryway seemed to shrink with his presence. She’d never been quite so aware of his size before. Or maybe it was her guilty conscience taking up extra space,
she thought uneasily. She linked her hands together in front of her and fixed her eyes somewhere in the vicinity of his collarbone.

“Can I…would you like a cup of coffee?”
Sure, Jessie,
it’s hotter than the hubs of hell out, so coffee is a
really great idea
.

“I wouldn’t be opposed to something cold if you had it.” Matt’s mouth curved in something that was almost—not quite, but almost—a smile, and Jessie’s eyes shifted almost compulsively to his, and she suddenly found the words just pouring out of her.

“I’m so sorry, Matt. I don’t know what I was thinking last night.” Without thinking, she reached out, and her breath caught on something that was nearly a sob when he took her hands in his. “I just… I’ve wanted this for so long, and I’ve thought about it but didn’t know how to go about actually
doing
something about it, and then you came home and you kissed me, and Lurene said you were sexy and she was right, only I hadn’t thought of you that way until then.”

She was half-aware of Matt drawing her out of the entryway and into the sunny welcome of the kitchen. Now that she’d started, the tangled explanation just kept pouring out.

“In a way, it started with Pammie Sue Jenkins. I saw her at the market a few days before you came home. She was wearing a really ugly maternity dress, and she was so smug about it, and I know it’s stupid but it made me realize how much I wanted one myself.”

“You want an ugly maternity dress?” Matt asked, taking advantage of the momentary pause when she drew a breath. He opened cupboards until he found glasses and took a pitcher of iced tea out of the refrigerator, moving with the easy familiarity of an old friend, and Jessie felt
the tension recede a little more. He would hardly be pouring her a glass of iced tea, remembering that she liked one spoonful of sugar and no lemon, if he’d come to tell her that their friendship was over.

“Not the dress,” she said, smiling a little. “A baby. It made me realize just how much I wanted a baby.” She sighed and looked down at the table, tracing her finger over the oak grain. “I’ve always wanted children, and talking to Pammie Sue that day, it just made me realize that I might never have any. She’s my age, and she’s really annoying, but she has two and a half children already, and a twerpy little husband, and she’s so…so smug about it.”

“About the two and a half kids or the twerpy husband?” Matt set her glass in front of her and moved back to lean his hips against the counter, one leg bent at the knee, his foot braced on the curved brass handle of a drawer.

“Both, I guess.” Jessie took a quick sip of tea without tasting it. “Pammie Sue’s an expert at being smug.”

“Everyone’s gotta have a talent,” Matt said.

“I suppose.” It was only now, with the relief slowly seeping through her, that Jessie realized just how scared she’d been. But it was going to be all right. Matt wouldn’t be here like this if he hated her. Drawing a shallow breath, she lifted her eyes to his, her smile still a little uncertain. “I’m really sorry, Matt. I never should have asked you to…what I asked you. I hadn’t thought about how you’d feel afterward if we… about a—” She broke off, feeling her skin heat, knowing he couldn’t fail to see the warm flush in her cheeks. “It was a crazy idea, and I’m sorry I tried to drag you into it.”

Matt didn’t respond immediately. He’d been awake until almost dawn, chewing over his brother’s advice to
think about what he wanted. It was quite a shock to discover that he wanted Jessie Sinclair. The knowledge was unexpected, unwanted. His own life was still in pieces. Maybe he’d made the right choice in coming back here, and maybe he was starting to pull it all back together, but he still had a ways to go. The last thing he needed was to start a new relationship with a woman. With Jessie, for God’s sake. With Jessie, who was almost certainly in love with another man, and not just any other man but Reilly, his best friend. It was like something out of a frigging soap opera, he thought with a flash of black humor.

Gabe had asked him to think about what he wanted, and, as he lay there in the darkness, staring up at the ceiling, the one thought that had been crystal clear was that he wanted Jessie. There was nothing else.

Just Jessie.

He couldn’t put a label on the wanting—maybe he wasn’t ready to do so—but he wanted her in his life. In his bed, God help him. He wanted to bury his hands in her honey-colored hair. He wanted to feel those mile-long legs wrapped around his waist. He wanted to run his hands and his mouth over every inch of her until she sobbed his name. And the thought of her belly swelling with his child was enough to bring him to iron-hard arousal in an instant.

He wanted to sit with her in the warmth of a summer evening, listening to the crickets sing in the darkness. He wanted to walk with her through the winter rain, see her laugh as she danced through the puddles. He wanted to sleep next to her at night and wake up with her in the morning. The wanting was so powerful, so total, that it was as if it had always been there inside him, just waiting for him to acknowledge it.

Maybe it was love. Maybe it was lust. Maybe it was
just his own desperate need to reclaim his life, to feel whole again. Maybe he was using her, but, if he was, he could at least give something back. She’d asked him for a child. It would be the sweetest gift he’d ever given.

“Jessie?” He waited until she looked at him, her eyes wide and vulnerable. His mouth quirked in a half smile. “If you want a baby, I’ll do my best to give you one.”

She stared at him, her eyes widening endlessly, her mouth dropping open ever so slightly. Shock rolled over her, through her, leaving her mind a perfect blank for the space of several seconds. He really was an incredibly attractive man, she thought, her mind stuttering to life with safe irrelevancies. The sunlight pouring through the window at his back pulled blue highlights from the thick darkness of his hair, like a raven’s wing. His eyes were pure sapphire, framed by ridiculously thick black lashes, and they were looking at her now, waiting for her to say something, to respond to what he’d just said, what he couldn’t possibly have said.