Marriage, Interrupted

That got a phlegmy sigh. “This is not exactly the best day of my life, you know?” Futzing again with her hair, the former Brooklynite turned, lifting disillusioned green eyes to Cass. “So I could use a little cheering up. So I’m wearing red. So what are they going to do, kick me out of the funeral home?”

Cass scraped her lip between her teeth. Alan had been Lucille’s only child, dutiful in his own way, she supposed, but not exactly a joy to his mother’s heart from what Cass had observed over the past year or so. If Lucille was mourning anything, most likely it was for a relationship that had soured long before the man’s death.

And Lucille didn’t know the half of it.

But they were tough broads, the pair of them. They’d both get through this. “No one’s kicking you out of anywhere, Cille. Not without getting by me first—”

“Mom?”

Sweeping her uncombed hair away from her face, Cass shifted her gaze to the doorway, where her son stood awkwardly attired in some friend’s sports jacket and khakis—a startling contrast to his normal uniform of frayed jeans and oversize T-shirts. What a stunner to glimpse the adult Shaun would one day be. If she didn’t strangle him first. She supposed their mother-teenage-son relationship was no more fraught with problems than usual—and probably less, if she thought about it—but there were times…

Times she wondered if he’d ever understand.

“My God!” Cille craned her neck to look up at him on her way out of the room. “The boy has ears.”

With a self-conscious grin, Shaun touched his right ear, revealed by dint of the ponytail into which he’d pulled his shoulder-length blond hair. Even though all his friends wore their hair short, he had to do things his own way. Including the trio of open-ended loops in one ear, courtesy of some galpal with a hot needle and an ice cube a few months back. The only thing keeping Cass from killing him that time was the nasty infection that had nearly done the job for her. “Cool, huh?”

“Literally,” Cass agreed, deciding to be grateful Shaun had shown no desire to pierce other body parts. Or dye his hair chartreuse. “Now that they’ve made contact with the air…what?”

Shaun had held up one hand, angling his head into the hall. When the door to Lucille’s bedroom clicked shut, Shaun turned back, fidgeting with one of the jacket’s pocket flaps. The grin had vanished, replaced with an expression of uneasy concern. “How’re you doing?”

He’d asked her that a hundred times since Alan’s death. She’d yet to be truthful. “I’m managing—”

“Dad’s here.”

“What?” She dropped, hard, onto the edge of her bed. “Why?”

A mixture of defiance and guilt flashed through all-too-familiar hound dog eyes. “I called him, yesterday morning.”

Shock jolted a million nerve endings, leaving her slightly dizzy. “You asked him to come down?”

“I…uh…” He wriggled his shoulders underneath the jacket, stuck his hand in the coat pocket. Took it out again. “I just told him what’d happened, is all. I didn’t know he was coming.”

But he obviously knew that’s what Blake would do. Cass swallowed her immediate reaction—that none of this had anything to do with her ex-husband and why the hell was he here, invading their privacy?—when she remembered that Shaun had been jockeying for his father’s attention all his life. Why should it come as any surprise, then, that he should want Blake here now? Especially when this past year had turned out to be such a colossal disappointment.

“Mom?”

Cass’s head jerked up, her heart aching for the child still hovering underneath the fragile, easily punctured surface of new adulthood. She’d done her best, had only wanted something better for him when she’d married Alan. That it hadn’t turned out the way she’d hoped wasn’t anyone’s fault, but still—and again—her son had gotten the short end of the stick.

“It’s okay? That I called Dad?”

In his frown, she could still see the toddler seeking Mommy’s approval. She pushed herself off the bed and crossed to him, slipping her hand into his. How odd, she thought, to be pregnant with her second child when her first was already several inches taller than she. “Of course, honey. You…he…” Her shoulders raised, then dropped. “It just took me by surprise, that’s all.”

Underneath the unfamiliar clothes, the boy’s entire body let out a sigh. “Okay. Well. I think he wants to talk to you.”

Just when you think things can’t get any worse…

“Tell him I’ll be out in a minute,” she said.

They say it takes a big man to admit when he’s made a mistake. In which case, Blake thought as he sensed more than heard Cass enter the room, he should be at least twelve feet tall by now. His feigned interest in the ostentatiously large impressionistic landscape over the stone fireplace immediately abandoned, he pivoted, his breath catching in his throat.

He’d never seen her look worse.

Her gold-tipped bangs catching in her lashes with each blink, she stood at the edge of the step leading down into the brick-pavered living room, one hand propped on her lower back. Despite her above-average height, she seemed dwarfed by the tedious expanse of chalky white wall, soaring fifteen feet to the beamed ceiling overhead. A bank of clerestory windows slashed the top of the wall, choking the air with sunlight, but even so, the room seemed cold. Inhospitable.

A smile flitted over her lips, as if she wasn’t sure what was appropriate, under the circumstances. “Well. This is a surprise.”

His pulse involuntarily quickened at the sound of that crème-de-menthe voice. He used to tell her she could make ordering breakfast in a truck stop sound like a seduction. And she would laugh, right before she’d give him a smile that made the laugh seem childlike by comparison.

She wasn’t smiling now. Instead, she’d obviously been crying. Well, what did he expect? She’d just lost her husband, for God’s sake—

Breathe, Carter. Breathe.

There was nothing he could say that would make any sense, or make things any easier. He hadn’t been sure, when he’d decided to come down from Denver, what he thought he could possibly do. What a shock to discover that all he really wanted was to pull her into his arms. “How are you holding up?”

She carefully stepped down into the room. “I’ll let you know when the Prozac wears off,” she quipped, just as he would have expected. For a second, irritation prickled his skin. Cass had always used humor as a cop-out to mask what was really going on in her head. Blake had never been sure what, exactly, had destroyed their marriage, since Cass had too often substituted wisecracks for honesty. Oh, the obvious reasons were, well, obvious enough. What fed those reasons, however, was something else again. Now, twelve years later, the relationship was undefined, ambiguous. Not friendship or love or hate or even mutual disinterest colored their forced conversations. At least with good old-fashioned animosity, you knew what you were dealing with.

With an unmistakable grimace, she lowered herself onto a ladderback chair in front of a bare window, next to a carved table littered with carefully arranged knickknacks. Blake remembered the posture well—legs apart, one hand still on her back, the other absently rubbing against her thigh. The memory slashed through his heart, catching him off guard. He didn’t let on. “I thought Shaun said the funeral was at eleven?”

“It is.”

“But you’re not dressed yet.”

Tropical blue eyes lifted to his, more weary than sad, he thought. Hoped. “I didn’t expect company this early on the day of my husband’s funeral.”

Point to her.

Cass cocked her head at him, her hand wandering over her swollen middle, instinctively massaging the child within. Another man’s child.

Another slash. Irrational and petty as it was.

“You didn’t have to come down,” she said.

“I got the feeling Shaun was asking me to.”

She nodded, then looked away, letting a silence slip between them so profound it was practically visible.

For a second he scrutinized her. She’d lightened her hair a little, he thought, the shag cut softly framing those high cheekbones, her long neck, in wispy strands of shimmering red-gold. Her smooth skin, pulled taut across model-worthy cheekbones, a square-edged jaw, was nevertheless etched with a tracery of worry lines, around her mouth, her eyes, between her brows. She seemed thinner, too, despite the pregnancy. That, he didn’t like. Her eating habits had always been atrocious; when she’d been pregnant with Shaun, they’d nearly come to blows over her diet. Olives for breakfast, he remembered. And French fries. But only Burger King’s, no one else’s. The one time he’d tried to sneak a package of McDonald’s fries past her…

Blake forced his attention elsewhere, again fighting the insane urge to hold her, to comfort her. As the friend he’d once been, if nothing else.

“Did you drive down?” The question echoed in the vast room.

“Yes. Figured I’d rather have my own car.”

She nodded again, slipped back into the silence.

She reminded him so much of the overwhelmed college freshman who’d tripped up his heart seventeen—no, eighteen—years ago. He’d been a senior, working part-time in UNM’s bookstore, when she’d come in, all huge eyes and tremulous smile, and he’d fallen so fast he didn’t even feel the bruises from landing for weeks afterward. A soft ache accompanied the memory of how hard she’d fought not to let him, or anyone else, know how petrified she was that first day. She wore exactly that expression now, overlaid with an edgy exhaustion that brought out a keen protective streak—for himself almost more than for her.