скачать книгу бесплатно
“Go get the condoms, Max, before we get carried away.”
With a sigh, he pulled back, but only to take her face in his hands. “When are we going to have another baby? After the twins, you agreed we’d have more.”
She twisted away from his searching gaze. “I don’t recall—”
“Yes, you did. When you took the job with Ray you said, ‘It’s something to do until we have another child.’ That was over a year and a half ago. When, Kelly? When are we going to have another kid?”
“I don’t know. Someday. When the time is right.”
“The twins start school next year, which’ll leave you free to care for a new baby.”
“Or to pursue my career.” She rolled over, shutting him out. “Don’t pressure me, Max. I have so little that’s all my own.”
“You have your flowers.”
She snorted derisively. “Dried-flower arrangements I give away to friends—it’s a hobby. I want to contribute to the household, too.”
“You do, immeasurably. Not all contributions are monetary. And money isn’t necessarily the most important contribution.”
“Try running a household without it. If you think I spread myself too thin now, what would I be like with another baby?” He had no answer to that. Kelly felt bad at disappointing him. Now she vaguely remembered she had agreed to have more children. But that had been before she knew how important having a job of her own would become to her. “I’m sorry, Max. I know you want a son.”
His silence took on a strained quality. She turned back to him, shocked to see his face drained of color. “Good grief, Max, you’re as white as the sheets.”
“I love the girls, Kel,” he said earnestly.
“Of course you do.” He was so sweet, so silly, sometimes. “Go get the condoms.”
He left her and went to his suitcase. A moment later she heard him swear. “What is it?”
He turned to her, his open hands empty. “I bought a new box especially for this weekend. I was positive I put it in my suitcase. Now I can’t find it.”
Oh, great. Their big romantic weekend and they couldn’t make love. She glanced at the bedside digital clock. By now it was so late the hotel store would surely be shut. Max looked so disappointed and frustrated she beckoned him with a smile. “Never mind. I’m sure one night won’t hurt. Come here, lover.”
MAX AWOKE EARLY, A LITTLE tired but with a lingering sense of deep satisfaction. The night before they’d made love not once but twice—something they hadn’t done in years, not since before the twins were born.
Kelly slept on, one hand tucked under her chin. She was so familiar to him that sometimes he couldn’t see her. Mentally he traced the lines of her face, the short straight nose, the cheekbones she wished were higher, the sweetly curving mouth and small chin. Out of context, she became a stranger again. A pretty, sexy stranger.
He skimmed a finger down the bridge of her nose, and she reached up in her sleep to scratch. He waited until her hand fell away, then did it again.
Her eyes, deep brown in the half light, opened. When she saw him watching her, two small vertical lines pulled her eyebrows together. “Don’t wake me up,” she mumbled sleepily. “You know I hate being woken up.”
The pretty sexy stranger would have wanted him to wake her up. Max sighed and slid out of bed to head for the shower.
As the steaming water sluiced over him, he considered Randall. He had to tell Kelly about the boy, and he would, but not until they’d had more time to cement their closeness. Another day should be enough. A hike in the woods, a nice dinner, a Jacuzzi in the evening, followed by more lovemaking…
When he came out of the bathroom, a towel wrapped around his waist, Kelly was sitting up in bed, combing her fingers through her hair.
“Come here,” she said, fully awake now and smiling.
Max leaned in for a kiss. Instead of meeting his lips, Kelly rubbed her cheek over his freshly shaven jaw. “I love it when you’re all smooth and yummy smelling. Come back to bed.” She tried to pull him down on top of her.
“Later.” He yanked the covers off the bed, making her giggle and shriek. “Get up, woman. We’ve got ground to cover.”
Ravenous after the previous night, they ate enormous plates of bacon and eggs in the hotel dining room, then set off on the trail that zigzagged down the cliff beside the river. Through the trees, they could hear the roar of Snoqualmie Falls.
“I wonder how the kids are doing?” Kelly said. “I hope Nancy made them breakfast and didn’t just let them snack on junk.”
Max stopped abruptly. “We need to make a rule for this weekend—no talking about the kids or our jobs.”
“But—” Kelly began, then said “—you’re right. No kids. No jobs.”
Twenty minutes later the silence stretched. “What are you thinking?” Max finally asked.
“I’m thinking I should have done a load of laundry before we left so Beth’s judo outfit would be clean for her training session Monday.”
“No kids, no jobs, no chores.”
“But, Max, that’s our life,” Kelly protested, only half joking.
“Look at that.” He paused at the observation deck, with its view of the falls—a foaming spill of white water dropping nearly three hundred feet down the cliff face. “It’s more spectacular than I remembered.” Max took in a deep breath that made his chest rise beneath his plaid flannel shirt. “This is wonderful. Fresh air, exercise, good food, great sex…” He pulled Kelly close and breathed in the scent of her hair. “And my best gal by my side.”
She slipped her arms around his waist. “Your only gal, don’t you mean?”
He kissed her forehead and the tip of her nose and would have continued on down to her mouth.
“Max,” Kelly began, interrupting him. “Did you mean what you said last night about not wanting a boy?”
Her speculative tone and searching gaze put him immediately on guard. He’d reacted too strongly to her innocent suggestion that he wanted a son. She’d take it as a sign he was hiding something. As he was. “Why wouldn’t I mean it?”
“I’ve always wondered,” she went on, undeterred by his feeble protest, “if you weren’t a teeny bit disappointed we had all girls.”
He wanted to reassure her that wasn’t the case; hell, he wished he could convince himself. But the words stuck in his throat. The letter from Randall had brought his emotions too close to the surface for him to be able to lie.
Avoiding eye contact, he muttered something unintelligible and returned to the path that led to the river.
“Max!” Kelly hurried after him, sending twigs and small stones skittering. “What’s wrong with you?”
“Nothing.”
“I asked you something important, and instead of answering, you stride off without a word. I want to know what’s wrong.”
“There’s nothing wrong. Just forget it.”
“You never talk about your feelings,” Kelly complained. “This weekend is an opportunity to work out some of the kinks in our relationship. You can’t just walk away from an emotionally difficult subject.”
“Feelings. You always want to talk about feelings.”
He strode on. Talking about that stuff made him uncomfortable; it highlighted what was wrong with their relationship, instead of focusing on what was right. And whenever Kelly started discussing their problems, he felt he’d failed her somehow. Not that he would ever admit it.
She called again, exasperated. “Max!”
“If you would quit working or cut back your hours,” he yelled over his shoulder, “we might not have kinks in our relationship.”
Throwing a blatant red herring in her path was a dirty trick, but he hadn’t yet figured out what he was going to do about Randall, and until he did, he didn’t want to talk about sons, real or hypothetical.
“That is so unfair!” She kicked her booted foot at a rotting stump beside the path, scattering crumbling bits of decaying wood.
He shrugged and kept on walking. “You wanted to know what I thought.”
“You’re avoiding the real issue,” she insisted. “You want another child and I…I’m not ready.”
He snapped a dry twig off a branch in passing and flung it down the hillside, where it snagged on a bush. “You keep saying ‘maybe’ and ‘later,’ but later never comes and maybe means nothing. Face it, you have no intention of having another baby.”
“I never said that!”
“You didn’t have to.” Fed up, he increased his pace.
Max felt her angry silence bombard his back as they descended toward the valley floor around hairpin turns in the narrow path. Gradually his temper cooled. He could put their spat from his mind, if not the cause of it, but he knew Kelly would continue to dwell on the problem until they made up.
With a sigh, he stopped again, took her in his arms and rubbed her nose with his. “I forgive you.”
She snorted, half amused, half annoyed, but wholly unrelenting. “Max, you know we should talk more.”
“Aw, Kel, it’s too nice a day to hash things over. Come on, we’re almost at the river.”
Reluctantly she gave up the fight. “Oh, all right.”
Another hundred feet and the trail led them out of the woods to the edge of the tumbling river. Silenced by the roar of water and awed by the grandeur of the falls, they turned to each other. His hands lightly touching her waist, he kissed her, putting all the tenderness he could into the soft pressure on her lips, and he felt her irritation dissolve in the misty air.
High overhead, treetops were moving in the wind, which blew clouds across the sun, but there on the river all was still and warm. They walked along the gorge until they came to a large flat rock where they could sit side by side, looking toward the falls.
From her day pack Kelly removed the lunch the hotel had prepared for them. “Want a sandwich?” she asked, speaking over the sound of water. He nodded and she handed him one. “Remember when we came here on our honeymoon? We smuggled our own food into the hotel because we didn’t have the money to buy meals.”
“How did you get stuck with such a cheap bastard?”
“I guess I got lucky,” Kelly said, munching happily.
“Do you still think you’re lucky?” Max tossed a breadcrumb to a junco that had fluttered down onto the next rock. The small gray bird snapped up the crumb in its beak and turned its black head to regard him with one beady eye. Kelly still hadn’t answered. “Never mind,” Max said. “Dumb question.”
“We were so young when we married,” she said at last. “I was straight out of high school and you were only a year older.” Kelly placed a hand on his jaw, forcing him to look at her. “I can’t imagine life without you.” She shook her head with a wry grin. “Sometimes I can’t imagine life with you, either.”
He nudged her off balance, then caught her before she toppled. She fell into his arms, laughing. He said, “I’ll never understand why your grandmother allowed you to marry so young. If you’d been my daughter…”
“She let Geena go to New York on a modeling contract when she was sixteen. How could she stop me from marrying at eighteen? Gran always told us we had good heads on our shoulders and that we should trust our own judgment.”
“Bulldust. You and your sisters were as headstrong as wild ponies. You always got your way. Erin was the most sensible, but your Gran was as weak as water where you girls were concerned.”
“Don’t you criticize Gran,” she said, wagging a finger at him. “At least she considered my feelings. Your parents did everything they could to stop us from getting engaged. The moment they heard we wanted to get married after graduation they shipped you off to that job on the dude ranch, hoping you’d forget me over the summer.”
The bite of sandwich in his mouth suddenly turned dry and lumpy. Why the hell had he brought up the past? “But I didn’t, did I?” he demanded, feeling an urgent need to reconnect with Kelly. He did not want to lose the woman he’d spent more than a decade building a life with.
She tilted her head, clearly puzzled by his tone. “No,” she said slowly. “You came home even more loving than when you left…if that’s possible.”
He kissed her, almost desperately, deepening the kiss until she melted against him, as he’d hoped she would, and slid her arms around his neck.
Finally she drew back, eyes grave. “All right, Max. You’d better tell me all about it.”
Despite the warm sun, a chill raised bumps on Max’s forearms. How could she know? He’d hidden the letter from Randall deep in the bottom drawer of his office filing cabinet. “What do you mean?”
“You’re hiding something,” Kelly stated. “You’ve been acting really weird all weekend, guilty and secretive—when you weren’t giving me a tumble, that is.” She crossed her arms. “Spill it.”
At first Kelly thought he would evade this demand for explanations, too. Then before her eyes, Max seemed to shrink from her and turn inward. Her heart sank. Whatever he was hiding must be really bad. He was having an affair. He wanted a divorce. He—
“I have a son.”
She stared. She’d heard him speak, but his words had no meaning. “What did you say?”
“I have a son,” he repeated.
“That’s impossible. Unless,” she added with a short humorless laugh, “one of the twins had a sex change.”
“Kelly.”
“But it’s impossible, Max,” she repeated. “We were married right out of high school. How could you have a child I don’t know about?”
“I got a letter from him yesterday.” Max crumpled the plastic wrap his sandwich had come in and compressed it into a tiny ball. “His name is Randall Tipton. He’s thirteen years old and he lives in Wyoming.”
The bottom fell out of Kelly’s world. One moment the sun was shining on her and Max, a unit despite their problems, as solid as the rock on which they were sitting. The next instant she was in free fall, with no hope of safe landing.
Questions crowded her tongue, clamoring for expression. “But how…? When…? Who is the mother?”
“Her name is Lanni. She worked at the dude ranch.”
Spinning, sinking, Kelly spiraled down through a swirling gray void. “You had an affair with another woman while you were engaged to me?”
“You’d broken off the engagement before I left for the ranch, remember?”
“Your parents broke it off. I had every intention of marrying you as soon as we had the opportunity. I thought you felt the same.”
He stared at her as if she were speaking a foreign language. “You said we should go along with their wishes. I left for Wyoming thinking you weren’t going to marry me.”
“I thought you’d come sweeping back one moonlit night and carry me away, that we would elope or something equally romantic. Instead…” Tears swam in her eyes as she gazed at him, stricken, “You were with this Lanni person.”
He tried to take her hand. “Forget Lanni. She’s not important.”
“How can you say she’s not important?” Kelly shrilled, tugging away. “She’s the mother of your child.”
Kelly wrapped her arms around her shivering body and buried her face in her knees. Max, her anchor, her rock, the husband she thought she knew inside out, had suddenly, nightmarishly, become a stranger.
