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The smile relaxed, a little. “I gave him a bath. Or he gave me one, I wasn’t quite sure which. He asked where you were.”
“He …? Oh. You almost had me there for a second.”
C.J. slid his hands into his khaki pockets, his eyes fixed on hers. “You aren’t going to ask who I was arguing with?”
“Why would I do that?” she said, slightly confused. “It’s none of my business.”
“It’s not an old girlfriend, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“I’m not thinking anything. Really.”
Actually, her brain was processing so many possibilities she half expected it to short out. But if he was hinting that maybe he was ready to talk … well. He’d have to do more than hint. Because almost every time she’d handed him an opening the past few days, he’d clammed up. So, tough.
Never mind that everything inside her was screaming to give him one more chance, one more opening. To be the sounding board she suspected he’d never had, or at least not for a long time. But torn as she was, the new Dana—the older, wiser Dana—had finally learned there were some roads best left unexplored.
At least, until she was sure she’d come out okay on the other end.
C.J. closed the space between them, taking her bag. “I’ll carry this out to the car for you.”
“You don’t have to—”
“Hush, woman, and let me be the man.”
The cat barreled past her when the door opened, streaking into the night. They walked to her car in silence; C.J. opened her door, setting the bag in back.
“Thanks.”
“De nada.” Was she hallucinating, or was he focusing entirely too much on her mouth? Then he lifted his hand, and she held her breath …
… and he swatted away a tiny night critter fluttering around her face.
Then, with what sounded like a frustrated sigh, he gently fingered a loose curl hovering at her temple.
“I’m a mess, Dana.”
“So I noticed.”
He dropped his hand. And laughed, although the sound was pained. “And here I always thought Southern women bent over backward to be diplomatic.”
“Clearly you’ve been hanging out with the wrong Southern women.”
“Clearly,” he said, his expression unreadable in the harsh security light. Then, gently: “Go, Dana. For both our sakes … go.”
Only, after she slid behind the wheel, he caught the door before she could close it. “That was my father,” he said. “On the phone.”
Her breath caught. “Oh? Um … I’m sorry?”
“Don’t be. I finally got some things off my chest. Someday, I’ll tell you the whole sordid story. If you really want to hear it, I mean.”
Afraid to speak, she simply nodded. He pushed her door shut; her throat clogged, Dana backed into the street, put the car into Drive, drove away. Noticed, when she glanced into her rearview mirror, C.J. still standing in the driveway, hands in his pockets, watching her until she got all the way to the end of the street.
“Oh, Merce,” Dana whispered to herself. “Now this is huge.”
“No news yet?” Val asked from the doorway to C.J.’s office.
He swiveled in her direction. “What? You’re bugging the phones now?”
“No, I was on my way to the kitchen and your voice carries. And when you’re the youngest of seven you get real good at deducing what’s going on from only one side of the conversation.” She waltzed in and plopped down across from him. “So what’d she say? That private investigator gal?”
“Not much. But if Trish is working off the books somewhere, or hasn’t used a credit card recently, it might be harder to track her down.”
“Well, the child couldn’t have just vanished. She’s bound to turn up, sooner or later.”
“That’s what worries me.”
“I don’t understand, I thought you wanted to get things settled. Legally. So there’d be no question.”
On a weighty sigh, C.J. leaned back in his chair, tossing his pen on his desk. Frankly, he doubted things would ever feel settled again. With Trish, with Dana …
Oh, God, Dana. The more he was around her, the less he could figure out if she was the best thing, or the worst thing, to happen to him. If she’d had any idea how close he’d come to kissing her the other night …
And then what? Take her to bed? Lead her to believe things were headed in a direction he couldn’t, wouldn’t go? That much of an idiot, he wasn’t.
At least, he hoped not.
He stuffed his thoughts back into some dark, dank corner of his brain and once again met Val’s quizzical, and far too discerning, gaze. “If Trish doesn’t reappear soon,” he said, “the law’s on my side. I’d get custody free and clear. It’s the limbo that’s killing us.”
“Us? Oh. You and Dana?”
He let his gaze drift out the window. “Until we know what Trish is really up to, we can’t make any permanent arrangements. Which we very much want to do. Need to do. For Ethan’s sake.”
The older woman eyed him for several seconds, then rose. “Well, I truly hope it all works out. For everybody. And soon. So … subject change—you ever decide who to take to the charity dinner Saturday night?”
Despite the permanent knot in his chest these days, C.J. chuckled. “It’s not the prom, Val. And I’m taking Dana.”
“‘Bout time you did something right,” she said, and waltzed back out.
Big whoop, he thought. One measly thing out of, what? A hundred? A thousand? Not that he didn’t want to do the right thing, or things, it was just that he still wasn’t sure what, exactly, that was.
Two showings, an office meeting and a closing later, he walked through the garage entrance into his house to be assailed by the mouth-watering aroma of roast pork, the pulse-quickening beat of bluegrass fiddle. Tugging off his tie, he followed his nose to the kitchen, where Dana—oblivious to his arrival—was stirring something in a pot on the stove, her white-shorted fanny wiggling in time to the music. In one corner, safely out of harm’s way, Ethan sat up in his playpen, gnawing on a set of plastic keys. The instant he caught sight of C.J., though, the keys went flying. With a huge grin, the baby lifted his arms, yelling “Ba!”
Dana whipped around, her hand splayed across her stomach. As usual, several pieces of her hair had escaped her topknot, curling lazily alongside her neck, the ends teasing her collarbone and the neckline of her loose tank top. She laughed. “Somebody needs to put a bell on you, mister! You’re home early!”
Home. The word vibrated between them, like a single note plucked on a violin, clear and pure and destined to fade into nothingness. A word C.J. had never associated with this house. Or any other place he’d ever lived, for that matter. A concept he’d never associated with himself, he realized as he set down his briefcase and scooped up his baby son, who began to excitedly babble about his day.
C.J. stood there, literally soaking up his baby’s slobbery smile. At that moment, he felt as though he’d stepped into some family sitcom, where no matter what tried to rip apart the characters during the course of the episode, family ties always triumphed in the end. Except real life wasn’t a sitcom, and the habit of a lifetime wasn’t going to be fixed in twenty-two minutes.
“What’s all this?” he asked, deliberately derailing his own train of thought.
“Nothing ‘all this’ about it. Business was slow so I took off early, figured I might as well throw the pork in the oven. We’re eating in the dining room, by the way.”
He glanced toward the room in question, saw the table set with place mats, cloth napkins, candlesticks. A centerpiece, for God’s sake.
“I never eat in the dining room,” he said.
“Then it’s high time you did,” she said.
Honest to Pete, she’d had no agenda behind dinner beyond feeding everybody. Roasts were no-brainers, for heaven’s sake. As were boiled potatoes and steamed asparagus. Okay, so maybe the gravy was a little tricky, but not if you’d been making it since you were twelve.
And really, she hadn’t been trying to impress him or anything with the table setting, she’d just thought it seemed a shame, never using the dining room. The man needed to start appreciating his own house, that’s all.
So the look on his face when he’d walked in, smelled the cooking, seen the table, taken that first bite of pork … was icing on the cake. Seriously.
His chuckle when she handed him a dessert dish of Jell-O topped with a fluffy mountain of whipped cream, however … priceless.
They’d progressed to the family room, ostensibly to watch a film. She’d raided her parents’ stash of DVDs, hauling back everything from old Hepburn-Tracy flicks to Clint Eastwood westerns, vintage Woody Allen to Indiana Jones, eighties-era chick flicks to over-the-top disaster movies. But the slim, colorful cases lay fanned out on the coffee table, temporarily forsaken. Instead, C.J. sat cross-legged on the floor in front of the fireplace with Ethan in his lap, halfheartedly fending off the baby’s attempts to steal his whipped cream, and Dana thought, Yeah, it’s like that.
Or could be, anyway.
“I’d forgotten how good this is,” he said.
“Isn’t it crazy?” she said, spooning a big glob into her own mouth. “Mama always used to make Jell-O for me when I was feeling down in the dumps.”
He lifted one eyebrow. “So it’s a comfort food, then?”
“Well, the whipped cream is the comfort food, actually. But squirting whipped cream directly into your mouth is really pathetic.”
“Or efficient,” he said with a grin. “Go away, cat,” he said to Steve, who kept trying to bat at the whipped cream. C.J. held the dish up out of the cat’s reach. “Mine. Mine, mine, mine.” Ethan’s eyes followed the dish, followed by a squawk. C.J. gave her a helpless look, and she giggled.
“Oh, go on, let him have some.”
C.J. blew out a sigh, but lowered the dish anyway. Only the poor cat couldn’t figure out how to attack something that wouldn’t stay still, his head bobbing along with the quivering whipped cream. C.J. laughed, and Ethan chortled, and the cat finally stalked off, thoroughly put out.
“So how’s the writing coming?” C.J. asked. Then frowned. “What?”
“Oh, nothing. It’s just that I hate that question.”
“Oh. Sorry. Why?”
“Because I never know how to answer it. I know you mean well, but—”
“It’s okay, I understand. Well, actually, I don’t, but if you don’t want to talk about it, you don’t want to talk about it.” He fed another bite of Jell-O to the baby, then said, “One question, though—does anyone else know you’re writing?”
“Not really. Well, my parents do,” she said on an exhaled breath. “My mother thinks it’s silly.”
His forehead creased. “Has she read any of it?”
“I doubt that would make a difference. It’s all a little too pie in the sky for her. Offends her practical sensibilities.”
“Because it’s a risk, you mean?”
“I suppose. She had enough trouble dealing with me going into business with Mercy and Cass, instead of getting a nice, secure accounting job with some well-established firm.” A smile flickered over her lips. “She worries.”
His dessert finished, C.J. set the dish up on the coffee table, then turned Ethan around to face him. Laughing, the baby dug his feet into the carpet and pushed up, clutching the front of C.J.’s shirt.
“Hey, look at you, hot stuff!” he said, clearly delighted, only to immediately suck in a breath. “Oh, God—when do they start walking?”
“Whenever they’re ready. Around a year, maybe later. He has to crawl first, though. At least, so I gather.”
And will I even be in the picture when that happens?
The thought pricked the haze of contentment she’d let herself be lulled into, propelling her to her feet to gather dessert dishes, which she carted back into the kitchen. C.J. followed, the baby in his arms.
“Hey. What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. Really,” she said with a forced smile when he frowned at her. “Just one of my moods again.” Then, because melancholy always led to masochism, she said, “So how exactly did you end up with my cousin, anyway?”
Clearly startled, C.J. pushed out a short laugh. “Where on earth did that come from?”
“I’m a chronic scab-picker, what can I tell you?”
He held her gaze in his for several seconds, then sighed.
“Trish had quit, maybe a week before, I don’t really remember. I was the only one in the office when she came in to pick up her last paycheck, except I had a little trouble finding it since Val had put it someplace ‘safe.’ Anyway, by the time I did, your cousin seemed very distraught. So … I asked her if she wanted to go get a drink.” His mouth pulled flat. “And things … took their course.”
She opened the dishwasher, started loading their dinner plates. “I see.”
“I’m not proud of it, Dana,” he finished softly. “It shouldn’t have happened. But I didn’t take advantage of her, if that’s what you’re thinking. Even if I did take advantage of … the situation. Just so you know, however,” he said, shifting the baby in his arms, “I don’t do that anymore. Start something I have no intention of finishing, I mean.” He smiled tiredly. “It gets old.”
“Yes,” Dana said carefully, once again all too aware of the warning in his words, no matter how mildly they’d been delivered. “I can see how it would. Well. Thanks. For being honest with me.”
“It’s the least I can do,” he said, and she thought, Geez, story of my life or what?
“Like hell you can wear that,” Mercy said, her face a study in horror.
Dana looked down at the black charmeuse tunic and ankle-length skirt, still in its transparent shroud from the cleaners, she was holding up to her front. They’d just locked up for the night, leaving only a couple of spotlights on in the front of the store, and Dana had—in a clearly misdirected moment—decided to show her partners what she was wearing. “What’s wrong with it?”
“You’ll look like a leech?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. It’s even got sparklies. See?” She wiggled the bag in front of Mercy, who recoiled.
“Okay, a leech with a Cher fixation.”
Dana looked to Cass, who was also going to the shindig. Under duress, apparently. Blake had insisted it would “do her good” to get out and mingle, although, according to Cass, all she really wanted to do was stay home and sleep.
“What are you wearing?” Dana now asked the blonde.
“Some red jersey number I’ve had forever.”
