A Marriage Worth Fighting For

Like the night Andy and Claudia had announced their engagement and their plans for the small, informal wedding that would be taking place in New York City just a couple of weeks from now. Alicia had urged Claudia to go for something bigger, even if it meant waiting, and when she thought back, she realized that MJ’s sister, Scarlett, had probably interpreted that in the worst way.

Alicia knew that at least some members of the McKinley family believed she’d married MJ for his money and status.

Well, they were right, weren’t they?

It was stupid and pointless to regret the rush of their Las Vegas wedding. Would their marriage have been any healthier and happier if they’d started it off with a well-organized splash, months in the planning? Would it have happened at all?

Doubtful.

MJ would have been bound to see sense and realize he could do so much better.

She shivered. It really was cold in the house. She’d tried the heating earlier tonight, but nothing happened when she touched the controls on the electronic thermostat. Apparently Andy hadn’t yet turned on the furnace, although he hadn’t mentioned it during their short phone call. Maybe he shared MJ’s preference for bracing doses of fresh air at a temperature of fifty degrees or less.

She crept upstairs and back to bed, but her churning feelings, her blank sense of the future and her freezing feet wouldn’t let her sleep, and when Abby and Tyler came bouncing into the room at just after six-thirty, she wasn’t sure how she was going to get through the day.

MJ checked out of the cheap motel on the outskirts of Albany at seven in the morning. His colleagues would be surprised to see him in surgery at eleven-thirty, after what he’d said to Raj on the phone last night, but it wasn’t their business.

Later, at his office, he would have to grab Carla, his office manager, and go through his schedule with her. He had to be realistic. If he and Alicia were going to give themselves a chance, then he needed to give them time. Time to talk. Time to compromise. Time to mine down to the depths of what was wrong.

It hit him again as he drove.

He did not want a divorce.

His throat hurt over it. His whole body hurt, knotted with the tension of rebellion and pain and refusal to accept his marriage was over.

He was not getting a divorce. He didn’t damn well believe in it! Not when you had kids. Not when you had a partnership that should have worked.

He accepted that Alicia wasn’t doing this on a shallow whim, and so he was going to have to work at changing her mind, and if she wasn’t expecting a fight from him over this, then she didn’t know him very well.

Did she know him well?

The question struck him suddenly, as if he had a passenger sitting beside him, grilling him on the issue. Did he know her?

Well, of course they knew each other! They each knew what the other ate for breakfast. They knew the sounds each other made in bed. He knew she liked diamonds and sapphires but not emeralds. She knew he detested reality TV.

Did any of that count as real knowledge?

They’d rushed into their marriage. He recognized that. He’d even recognized it at the time. He hadn’t thought it mattered, because in the moment he’d felt so incredibly, exhilaratingly sure. He’d had this all-seeing, all-knowing confidence—arrogance, let’s face it—that he could see the whole picture and that he understood what would make their marriage work better than anyone else.

How wrong had he been?

Chapter Four

Seven years earlier …

“Want to dress up tonight?”

Alicia gave MJ a questioning look and tucked the fluffy white hotel towel a little tighter between her breasts, and he thought that the gesture was an unconscious betrayal.

Of her increasingly urgent inner questions about where this relationship was going. Of the fact that the variety in her wardrobe was getting thin.

“I want to go someplace really special,” he added, so that she’d know he had plans.

“I’d love that,” she said, then warned him with a slow and almost cheeky smile. “But you’ve seen the dress before.”

“That’s okay. Gives me confidence. You’ve never yet worn anything I didn’t like.”

He suspected that most of her wardrobe came from charity stores, because even he, with no interest in fashion, could see that her carefully put-together outfits weren’t at the forefront of style. But she wore them with the aura of an Oscar-winning actress on the red carpet, as if she knew that she looked stunning, and as if she was wearing fifteen thousand dollars worth of fabric and design on her upper body alone.

He admired the bravado of the performance, and that she was successful at it. She was an astute shopper, and you had to really look closely to see that she wasn’t wearing a designer label after all, or that if it was, it was “vintage,” aka secondhand, rather than new.

Few people, male or female, did look that closely. They were too busy being struck dumb by her lush bow of a mouth, her dazzling blue eyes, her dynamite figure and her perfect bone structure.

With the towel still carefully wrapped around her, she walked across the carpet to the mirror-fronted closet that ran along one side of the narrow entrance to their hotel room, and he couldn’t take his eyes from her prettily manicured bare feet, which appeared to react with a sensual delight to the lush thickness, as if they were more accustomed to walking on nails.

This was rapidly becoming one of MJ’s favorite leisure-time activities—lying on a king-size bed surrounded by a heap of snowy pillows while he watched Alicia dress. The hair and makeup routines he could skip. Those took place in the secrecy of the bathroom, they were too arcane and technical, and the blow dryer was noisy. In any case, he considered that she looked just as good with no makeup, bed hair and a pillow-crease mark across her cheek.

But the way she shimmied her breasts into a pushup lace bra, or let a sheath of silky fabric slide down her body …

In the month since they’d started sleeping together, Alicia getting dressed was a process that frequently reversed itself before it was even finished and transformed into a completely different activity in a very satisfactory way.

Not today.

Today she was a little coy.

She did that sometimes—went inexplicably distant as if she didn’t want him to have too much of a good thing. When he reached out his arms for her—now, for example—she did that smile again and shook her head. “Later.”

“Why?” he lazily asked.

“Because later I’ll taste of chocolate.”

He didn’t point out that they could have now as well as later. He thought he understood why she needed to keep a hold of the reins in their relationship sometimes, and it didn’t bother him.

Tonight, especially, he’d been quite sincere in what he’d told her. He did want this to be a really special, unforgettable evening. He’d bought her something. His anticipation about seeing her face when she opened the gift almost outweighed his anticipation about her tasting of chocolate.

Forty-five minutes later, she was ready to go, wearing a splashy, strappy floral dress that showed off the light golden glow of her newly tanned shoulders. She’d spent most of the afternoon out by the pool, catching the March sunshine that was so much stronger here than it would have been in New York, while he’d gone off on his covert shopping mission.

While she was in the bathroom just now, he’d slipped the gift into the inside pocket of his suit jacket and he hoped the bulge didn’t show. He didn’t want to give it to her yet. Before dessert, maybe, when they were both replete with good food and just pleasantly mellow from a glass or two of wine.

He curved his arm around her bare shoulders as they walked into the five-star restaurant together. Her shoulders were sun-warmed and touched with pink and perfectly smooth. He wanted to pull her close, but this was a public place and he hadn’t been raised to feel comfortable about full-on displays of affection in front of strangers. Instead, he let his hand slide down to the small of her back and recognized his own sense of proud possession.

She turns every head in the room, and she’s with me.

He was dizzy about it. Even dizzier an hour and a half into their meal, after a little more wine than he’d planned.

“I’m having a great time,” he told her.

“Me, too.” She smiled. “You can be pretty funny, do you know that?”