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“Oh, good,” Jill said when she saw what he’d done. She looked relieved that he’d changed back into the shirt and slacks he’d been wearing the night before. “I forgot. I really did want all the stuff brought in before the neighbors saw it.”
“This is quite a haul,” he told her with a crooked smile. “Are you sure your guys aren’t in training to be second-story men?”
“Very funny,” she said, shaking her head at him, then smiling back. “There are actually times when I wonder how I’m going to do it on my own. Raise them right, I mean.” She turned large, sad eyes his way. “It’s not getting any easier.”
It broke his heart to see her like this. If only there was something he could do to help her. But that was impossible, considering the situation. If it weren’t for Brad... But that was just wishful thinking.
“You’re going to manage it,” he reassured her. “You’ve got what it takes. You’ll do it just like your parents managed to raise you. It comes with the territory.”
She was frowning at him. “But it doesn’t always work out. Your parents, for instance. Didn’t you used to say...?”
He tried to remember what he’d ever told her about his childhood. He couldn’t have said much. He never did. Unless he’d had too much to drink one night and opened up to her. But he didn’t remember anything like that. Where had she come up with the fact that his parents had been worthless? It was the truth, but he usually didn’t advertise it.
“Yeah, you’re right,” he said slowly. “My parents were pretty much AWOL. But you know what? Kids usually grow up okay anyway.” He spread his arms out and smiled at her. “Look at me.”
“Just about perfect,” she teased. “Who could ask for anything more?”
“My point exactly,” he said.
She turned away. She knew he was trying to give her encouragement, but what he was saying was just so much empty talk. It wouldn’t get her far.
“Come on,” she said. “I’ve got coffee, and as long as you want cake for breakfast, you can eat.”
The cake was slices from rejects—Dutch Apple Crust, Lemon Delight and Double Devil’s Food—but they were great and she knew it. She watched with satisfaction as he ate four slices in a row, making happy noises all the while.
The boys were playing in the next room. They were making plenty of noise but none of it sounded dangerous so far. Her batters were mixed. Her first cakes were baking. She still had to prepare some glazes. But all in all, things were moving along briskly and she was feeling more confident.
A moment of peace. She slipped into a chair and smiled across the table at him.
“You look like a woman expecting a busy day,” he noted, smiling back at her and noticing how the morning light set off the faint sprinkling of freckles that still decorated her pretty face.
She nodded. “It’s my biggest day ever. I’ve got to get cakes to the charity auction at the Lodge, I’ve got cakes due for six parties, I’ve got a huge order, an engagement party at the country club today at three. They want 125 mini Bundt cakes. I was planning to get started on them last night, but after the baby riot, I just didn’t have the energy.” She shook her head. “As soon as Trini gets here, we’ll push the ‘on’ switch and we won’t turn it off until we’re done.”
He grinned at her. “You look like you relish the whole thing. Or am I reading you wrong?”
“You’ve got it right.” She gave him a warm look. “I really appreciate you being here to help me last night,” she said, shaking her head as she remembered the madness. “That was so crazy.”
“Yeah,” he agreed, polishing off the last piece of Lemon Delight. “But nobody got hurt. It all turned out all right.”
She nodded, looking at him, at his dark, curly hair, at his calm, honest face. She felt a surge of affection for him, and that made her frown. They’d been such good friends at one point, but she hardly knew anything about what he’d been doing lately. He’d walked out of her life at the same time Brad had. Both her best friends had deserted her in one way or another.
What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Yeah, right.
“So the way I understand it,” she said, leaning forward, “you’ve been in Singapore for the last year or so.”
“That’s right.”
“Are you back for good?”
“Uh...” He grimaced. “Hard to say. I’ve got some options. Haven’t decided what I want to do.”
She thought about that for a moment. Did Connor ever have a solid plan? Or was it just that he kept his feelings close to the vest? She couldn’t tell at this point. She resented the way he’d walked off over a year ago, but that didn’t mean she didn’t still love him to death.
Best friends. Right?
She narrowed her eyes, then asked brightly, “How about getting married?”
He looked at her as though she’d suddenly gone insane. “What? Married? Who to?”
She laughed. She could read his mind. He thought she was trying out a brand-new idea and he was ready to panic. “Not to me, silly. To someone you love. Someone who will enhance your life.”
“Oh.” He still looked uncomfortable.
“I’m serious. You should get married. You could use some stability in your life. A sense of purpose.” She shrugged, feeling silly.
Who was she to give this sort of advice? Not only was she a failure at marriage, but she’d turned out to be a pretty lousy judge of character, too. “Someone to love,” she added lamely.
His blue eyes were hooded as he gazed at her. “How do you know I don’t have all those things right now?”
She studied his handsome face and shook her head. “I don’t see it. To me, you look like the same old Connor, always chasing the next good time. Show me how I’m wrong.”
She knew she was getting a little personal, but she was feeling a little confused about him right now. What was he doing here? Why was he sticking around?
In the bright light of day she thought she could see things more clearly, and that fresh sight told her he’d come with a goal in mind. If he’d just wanted to see her, make a visit, he’d have called ahead. No, Brad had sent him. Coming face-to-face in the hotel dining room had been a fluke. But what did Brad have in mind? Why didn’t Connor just deliver the message and go?
She was beginning to feel annoyed with him. Actually she was becoming annoyed with everything. Something was off-kilter and her day was beginning to stretch out ominously before her.
“Okay, let’s stop avoiding the real issue here.” She stared at him coolly. “No more denials. What does Brad really want?”
CHAPTER FOUR (#u1ad57c9d-4828-5ebb-a3c1-a037efa478bd)
“BRAD?”
Jill saw the shift in Connor’s eyes. He didn’t want to talk about this right now. He was perfectly ready to avoid the issue again. Well, too bad. She didn’t have all the time in the world. It was now or never.
“Yes, Brad. You remember him. My ex-husband. The father of my children. The man who was once my entire life.”
“Oh, yeah. That guy.”
She frowned. He was still being evasive. She locked her fingers together and pulled.
“So, what does he want?” she insisted.
Connor looked at her and began to smile. “What do you think Brad wants? He always wants more than his share. And he usually gets it.”
She shook her head, surprised, then laughed softly. “You do know him well, don’t you?”
Connor’s smile faded. He glanced around the kitchen, looking uncomfortable. “Does he have visitation rights to the boys? Does he come up here to see them or does he...?”
“No,” she said quickly. “He’s never seen them.”
For once, she’d shocked him. His face showed it clearly. “Never seen his own kids? Why? Do you have a court injunction or...?”
The pain of it all would bring her down if she let it. She couldn’t do that. She held her head high and met his gaze directly.
“He doesn’t want to see them. Don’t you know that? Didn’t he ever tell you why he wanted the divorce?”
Connor shook his head slowly. “Tell me,” he said softly.
She took a deep breath. “When Brad asked me to marry him, he told me he wanted a partner. He was going to start his own business and he wanted someone as committed to it as he was, someone who would stand by him and help him succeed. I entered into that project joyfully.”
Connor nodded. He remembered that as well. He’d been there. He’d worked right along with them. They’d spent hours together brainstorming ideas, trying out options, failing and trying again. They’d camped out in sleeping bags when they first opened their office. They’d been so young and so naive. They thought they could change the world—or at least their little corner of it. They’d invented new ways of doing things and found a way to make it pay. It had been a lot of hard work, but they’d had a lot of fun along the way. That time seemed a million miles away now.
“I knew Brad didn’t want children, but I brushed that aside. I was so sure he would change his mind as time went by. We worked very, very hard and we did really well together. The business was a huge success. Then I got pregnant.”
She saw the question in his eyes and she shook her head. “No, it was purely and simply an accident.”
She bit her lip and looked toward the window for a moment, steadying her voice.
“But I never dreamed Brad would reject it so totally. He just wouldn’t accept it.” She looked back into his eyes, searching for understanding. “I thought we could work things out. After all, we loved each other. These things happen in life. You deal with them. You make adjustments. You move on.”
“Not Brad,” he guessed.
“No. Not Brad.” She shrugged. “He said, get rid of them.”
He drew in a sharp breath. It was almost a gasp. She could hear it in the silence of the kitchen, and she winced.
“And you said?”
She shrugged again. “I’d rather die.”
Connor nodded. He knew her well enough to know that was the truth. What the hell was Brad thinking?
“Suddenly he was like a stranger to me. He just shut the door. He went down to Portland to open up a branch office for our business. I thought he would think it over and come back and...” She gave him a significant look. “But he never came back. He began to make the branch office his headquarters. Then you showed up and told me he wanted a divorce.”
Connor nodded. His voice was low and gruff as he asked her, “Do you want him back?”
She had to think about that one. If she was honest, she would have to admit there was a part of her—a part she wasn’t very proud of—that would do almost anything to get him back. Anything but the one thing he asked for.
She stared at him and wondered how much she should tell him. He was obviously surprised to know about how little Brad cared about his sons. A normal man would care. So Brad had turned out to be not very normal. That was her mistake. She should have realized that and never married him in the first place.
She also had to live with the fact that he was getting worse and worse about paying child support. There were so many promises—and then so many excuses. What there wasn’t a lot of was money.
The business was floundering, he said. He was trying as hard as he could, but the profits weren’t rolling in like they used to in the old days—when she was doing half the work. Of course, he didn’t mention that. He didn’t want her anywhere near the business anymore.
She knew he resented having to give her anything. After all, he’d given her the house—not that it was paid off. Still, it had been what she wanted, what she felt she had to have to keep a stable environment for the boys.
But now she was having a hard time making the mortgage payments. She had to make a go of her cake business, or else she would have to go back to work and leave the boys with a babysitter. She was running out of time.
Time to build her business up to where it could pay for itself. Time to stabilize the mortgage situation before the bank came down on her. Time to get the boys old enough so that when she did have to go for a real, paying job, it wouldn’t break her heart to leave them with strangers.
So, yes. What Brad wanted now mattered. Had he gone through a transformation? Had he come up with second thoughts and decided to become a friend to the family? Or was it all more excuses about what he couldn’t do instead of what he could? Women with husbands in a stable situation didn’t realize how lucky they were.
Funny. Sometimes it almost seemed as though Brad had screwed up her marriage and now he wanted to screw up her single life as well.
She shook her head slowly. “I want my life back,” she admitted. “I want the life I had when I had a loving husband. I want my babies to have their father. But I don’t see how that can ever happen.”
Her eyes stung and she blinked quickly to make sure no tears dared show up.
“Unless...” She looked up into Connor’s eyes. “Unless you have a message from Brad that he wants it to happen, too.”
Whistling in the wind. She knew how useless that was. She gave Connor a shaky smile, basically absolving him of all guilt in the matter. She saw the look in his eyes. He felt sorry for her. She cringed inside. She didn’t want pity.
“Don’t worry. I don’t expect that. But I do want to know what he sent you for.”
Connor shook his head. Obviously he had nothing to give her. So Brad must have sent him on a scouting expedition, right? To see if she was surviving. To see if she was ready to hoist the white flag and admit he was right and she was wrong. She couldn’t make it on her own after all. She should have listened to him. And now, she should knuckle under and take his advice and give it all up.
She bit her lip. She wasn’t disappointed, exactly. She knew the score. But she was bummed out and it didn’t help her outlook on the day.
A timer went off and she hopped up to check on her cakes. This was where she belonged, this was where she knew what she was doing. The realm of human emotions was too treacherous. She would take her chances with the baked goods.
* * *
Connor watched her getting busy again and he wished he could find some way to help her deal with the truth—that Brad didn’t want her. He couldn’t say it might never happen. Brad could change his mind. But right now, he didn’t want Jill at all. What he wanted was to be totally free of her. At least, that was how he’d presented things a few days ago when they’d talked.
Brad wanted that, and he wanted her to give up her remaining interest in the company. That was the message he was supposed to make her listen to. That was the message he just couldn’t bring himself to tell her. Maybe later.
He took his cup to the sink, rinsed it out and headed back into the living room. He was folding up the covers he’d used when the front door opened and a young woman hurried in.
Connor looked up and started to smile. It was Sara Darling, Jill’s sister, and she stopped dead when she saw who had been sleeping on her sister’s couch.
“You!” she said accusingly, and he found himself backing up, just from the fire in her eyes.
He knew that Sara and Jill were very close, but he also knew they tended to see things very differently. Both were beautiful. Where Jill had a head full of crazy curls that made you want to kiss her a lot, Sara wore her blond hair slicked back and sleek, making her look efficient and professional. Today she wore a slim tan linen suit with a pale peach blouse and nude heels and she looked as though she was about to gavel an important business meeting to order.
“What are you doing here?” she demanded of him. “Oh, brother. I should have known you’d show up. Let a woman be vulnerable and alone and it’s like sharks smelling blood in the water.”
“Hey,” he protested, surprised. He’d always been friendly with this woman in the past. “That’s a bit harsh.”
“Harsh? You want to see harsh?”
He blanched. “Not really.”
Okay, so Sara was being extra protective of her sister. He got it. But she’d never looked on him as a bad guy before. Why now? He tried a tentative smile.
“Hey, Sara. Nice to see you.”
She was still frowning fiercely. “You have no right to complicate Jill’s life.”
