Marriage, Interrupted

“I don’t need or want your help! So you can tell that idea to go take a hike!”

Inside, the phone rang. After a moment Towanda stuck her head out the door. “It’s for you, Miss Lucille. Your sister in Florida.”

With a sigh, Lucille took off her gloves and tossed them onto the tempered glass table, along with the trowel, which landed with an overloud clatter. “Well. The comments I could make about what I just heard.… All I can say is you should be grateful I’m the kind of woman who knows when to keep her thoughts to herself.” She started into the house, then hesitated, looking from one to the other. “You think you two could manage not to do each other in while I’m gone?”

After a moment they both nodded. Curtly.

For a full minute after Lucille’s departure, neither spoke. Still seething, Cass walked over to the edge of the deck, unsuccessfully ignoring the buzz of energy behind her. She grasped the railing, wincing at the sting of cold metal against her palms as she sucked in several deep breaths, trying to calm down. Trying to think, to ready herself for Blake’s attempt to take charge, to play macho man coming to the rescue. It would be just like him to try to exploit her current situation as a means to appease his own guilt for giving up when she’d really needed him. Wanted him.

Well, too damn bad, she thought sourly. A day late and a penny short, as they say.

And dammit, she thought on another tidal wave of emotion, why was it always all or nothing with this man? Why hadn’t he ever been able to find that middle ground between suffocating her with his protectiveness or ditching her completely?

Brother. Could she get herself in deep, or what?

The house. She would think about the house. Under other circumstances, she might have loved it, with its sweeping views of the city, the way the rooms seemed to endlessly flow into each other. But it was huge and a pain to keep up, and the idea of a baby toddling around with all these stairs scared the hell out of her. Selling it wouldn’t be such a horrible thing. As long as she could unload it before the bank foreclosed on the loan.…

Her fingers found their way to the crease between her brows. Almost immediately, she felt Blake’s arm slip around her shoulders.

Not good. Especially for someone whose grip on her emotions was as precarious as a car hanging off the edge of a cliff in some action movie, the seagull perched on its end the only thing that kept it from going over. With Blake’s touch, the seagull flew away.

And she crashed.

With a soft sob, she turned into the chest that had sheltered her when she was young, that she’d believed would always shelter her. Her bad, most definitely. Still, he smelled the same, felt the same, stroked her back as he always had, his fingertips massaging that spot between her shoulder blades that always tensed up. Like magic, the baby quieted as Blake stroked and soothed and gently rocked her.

It felt too familiar, too right and, consequently, all wrong. She dug into her sweater pocket for a tissue, pulling away to blow her nose.

“Sorry,” she mumbled, looking back out toward the city, shoving her hair out of her face. A nagging wind blew it right back.

“For?”

“Acting like a weepy broad.”

His arm possessed her shoulders again as he nuzzled the top of her head, his chuckle in her hair as soft and seductive as a summer breeze. “Broad seems apt at the moment,” he murmured, gently patting her belly.

She couldn’t back up quickly enough from the flashfire his touch ignited, spitting out the only words guaranteed to make him retreat. “I loved Alan!”

A long second passed, during which his features seemed to ossify, his normally luminous brown eyes turn the color of dried mud. “I’m sure you did.”

Once again she turned away. That Blake was enough of a gentleman not to point out that the man she loved had just screwed her to the wall, only made her angrier. And more confused.

“Cass.” When she refused to turn toward him, he touched her again, this time gently hooking two fingers underneath her chin. “Cass, look at me.” Finally, as if facing a painfully bright light, she glanced up, blinking, and saw the remnants of all the hope and promise of so many years ago, tattered and battered and bruised beyond recognition. Was she seeing what was in his eyes, though, or a reflection of what was in hers?

“Whatever’s happening here goes way beyond the wreck we made of our marriage,” he said. “I never stopped caring about you. No, it’s true,” he added at her snort of disbelief. “About what happens to you. Even now, if there’s anything I can do—”

“There isn’t,” she said flatly. Even less than his pity, the last thing she wanted was insincere lip service about how much he cared about her. Please. Maybe he had, at one point, on some level. But instead of facing their problems, working with her to figure out how to solve them, he’d run. That she’d repeated her mistake with Alan…

Not once, but twice, she’d placed her trust in rainbows. She’d really be an idiot to let it happen again.

“I’ve already got it all figured out,” she said. “I’ll sell the house, and we’ll get a smaller place. Lucille has some income of her own, and I’ve got the shop.” She lifted her chin. “God knows I’ve had a lot less, Blake. This was a shock, true, but it’s not a disaster.”

“You are Woman, you are Strong, you can handle it, right?” he said with a slanted smile that, a lifetime ago, had repeatedly hoodwinked her into bed and out of facing reality. For Shaun’s sake she’d regretted, even been angry, that Blake hadn’t been around more since their divorce; for her own, she’d been immensely grateful he’d stayed away. Because, rather than their strengths complementing each other, their weaknesses had only dragged each other down. Even letting him touch her—especially letting him touch her—was like doing a jig on the edge of a snake pit. Blindfolded.

“Something like that, yes,” she agreed, then started back inside, needing to tear herself away from the insane yearning to seek comfort in Blake’s embrace. After all, there was more to Woman than being strong enough to field all the crap life flung your way.

“What about the charge cards?” she heard behind her.

Turning back, she managed a smile. “Lucille probably made things sound worse than they are. It’s only two or three. I can manage the payments. No problem.” His eyes snagged hers, just long enough for her to realize what she had to say. To do.

“Okay, look, you’re welcome to hang around, for Shaun’s sake. But I really think it’s best if we…well, if we stay out of each other’s way as much as possible. I’ve simply got too much garbage swimming around in my head to deal with anything more.”

A breeze blew a strand of inky hair across his knotted brow. “I thought we were still friends, Sunshine.”

She bit back a curse. He hadn’t called her that since the early days of their marriage, when some group or other had resurrected the old song. Blake used to sing it to her—really, really badly—usually while dancing around the apartment with her. He was a really, really bad dancer, too, she recalled, the memory like a bittersweet poison.

“Be real, Blake—our friendship died with our marriage, and you know it.”

The frown turned into a full-blown scowl. “My fault?”

“No. No, Blake. Nobody’s fault.” That much she did believe. “But the only reason you’re here is for Shaun. Not for me, remember? There is nothing between us. Not anymore. And there’s not going to be. If you really want to help me, you’ll remember that and respect my wish to be left alone.”

With that she quickly went into the house, before Blake could see how badly she was shaking. It would be so easy to accept whatever he had to offer—his friendship, his help, even his concern. But “easy” came with a price, one she’d already paid too many times. With this last time, she was going to pay enough for a thousand women.

She stopped just inside the door until a contraction passed, then continued into the granite-and-chrome kitchen and poured herself a glass of orange juice. Towanda said something to her, but Cass only vaguely responded, and the woman went on about her business without further hassle.

She eased herself up onto a bar stool and palmed her forehead, her bangs spiked between her fingers. Lucille didn’t know the whole truth, thank God. Cass had threatened the lawyer within an inch of his life if he ever let on the extent of Alan’s—and now Cass’s—debt, let alone the nature of it. There had been no bad investment in some start-up company. True, the insurance had been borrowed against, his portfolio trashed, the equity in the house virtually tapped out. But there were more than three charge cards—each with a maxed-out credit limit greater than some people paid for their cars. Luxury cars. The truth was, no matter how hard she worked, she had no idea how she’d ever pay it all off.

Nor was she about to tell an eighty-year-old woman with a dicey heart that her son—her quiet, unassuming, ultraconservative son—had had a wee problem with gambling. That on his business trips, ostensibly to check out potential investments, he went instead to gambling meccas around the country. A string of good luck a few years back had made him far wealthier than his dry cleaning chain ever had, with the unfortunate effect of convincing Alan he was invincible. What Cass hadn’t known when they’d started dating was that his luck had begun a downward spiral—until he met her. He’d told her—after they were married, of course—that he liked to “dabble” in the market, and that since they’d started dating, he’d been doing very well. He called her his good luck charm; she hadn’t taken it seriously.

He must’ve thought she was one helluva rabbit’s foot.

And she must’ve been more worn-out than she’d thought to have taken him at face value, to have missed the signs of his sickness. Not to mention his true personality. He’d been a damn good actor, she’d give him that. Still, weren’t people who wore masks of their own supposed to be more adept at seeing through others’? In her case, apparently not.

The lies, the empty promises to get help, that came later, however—those, she couldn’t have missed if she’d been in a coma. If it hadn’t been for Lucille…

Cass kicked back the rest of her juice and slipped off the stool, then perambulated over to the sink where Towanda snatched it out of her hand and washed the glass, before hustling back to the other side of the kitchen. When Cass turned around, her heart somersaulted into her throat.

Blake blocked the kitchen doorway, his forearms bracing the frame. His right foot was thrust forward, the knee bent, accentuating the way his soft, worn jeans clung to thighs as muscled as they were during his college-track-team days. She forced her attention north, past his trim hips and waist, his chest, his shoulders, to a face locked in a determined grimace. The eyes fastened to hers glinted with anger and concern but not, she realized, pity.

She opened her mouth to say—Well, actually, she had no idea what she was going to say. Not that Blake was about to give her the chance.

“Now, you listen to me for a moment, Sunshine,” he started in, quietly, unaware of Towanda’s presence not ten feet away. “I know we’ve had our problems. And, God knows, we still do. But I’ve spent far too long taking out our differences on our son, staying away from him so I wouldn’t have to deal with you. I know what you’re going to say, so you can save your breath and let me fill in the blanks—yes, I took my sweet time figuring this out. And yes, I know I’ve screwed up big-time, especially with our son. No sense calling a skunk anything else. But I figure I can either let things go on the way they have been—and risk losing him altogether—or see if Shaun will give me a shot at coming up from behind. And since you’re Shaun’s mother, my trying to fix things with him and ignore you isn’t going to work. Which means you and I are both gonna have to finally grow up, decide exactly where we stand with each other and go from there.”