Peeking through the peephole was a mistake.
The effect of seeing Jack never lessened, and I froze for a moment, taking in the same basic ensemble as both visits to the hospital: jeans, tee shirt, jacket, and hair pulled into a ponytail. A couple of necklaces, one long and one short, were a new addition as well as a flat onyx-looking stud in each ear.
Arcing the door open, I stepped back with a smile of greeting, but he hesitated a moment before stepping over the threshold. His dark eyes heated up as they roved me from head to toe, lingering here and there. A flush flamed my entire body when his gaze hit mine again with a distinct spark of desire.
As he passed, I received a husky, “You are so rockin’ that dress, Mariss…”
When he paused in my personal space, I felt a kiss coming on, and I used closing the door as a diversion, hollering down the hall to Tristan, “Look who’s here!”
Tristan, as it turned out, was thoughtfully watching our exchange, and for the first time in his young life, his expression was not transparent to me. There was nothing I could even liken it to.
Jack went directly to Tristan, bumping fists in the manner he had taught him in the hospital, and they immediately began to chatter as long-lost friends.
Jack’s eyes continually strayed my way as I moved around, making sure to stay in his line of vision. Bending, I picked up Hot Wheels cars and filled Bally’s water bowl, bending again to set it on the floor.
Currently, the canine was on the other side of the patio door and not happy at being on the wrong side of the glass, especially with a stranger so close to Tristan. The dog, being a frisky lab, always needed several minutes to calm down before being allowed inside when anyone visited. Hooking a finger in her collar, I released her into Tristan’s care and then retreated to the kitchen.
With much importance, Tristan introduced his pet to Jack and asked, “Exactly how much bigger is Bally than Rusty?”
“How about I bring Rusty to visit Bally one day, and we can see?”
Pausing my stir of the pot of gumbo on the stove, I evaluated that statement. Bring Rusty to see Bally, as opposed to Bally to see Rusty? In all of my conversations with him, Jack had said nothing of the paternity test, which, according to the legal documents, required scheduling no later than next week.
The only time Jack had ever mentioned Tristan going to Los Angeles had included me also in the casual statement. ‘We should take him to Disneyland, and Legoland. Does he like Legos?’ Staring into the pot, I saw not food, but Jack’s earnest face.
“Okay guys, who’s ready to eat?” Venting stress into one last vigorous stir, I tossed the inquiry over my shoulder. After switching off the burner, I quickly extracted flatware and stoneware from the clean dishwasher.
“Me! Me!” Tristan enthusiastically affirmed, and then the tiny voice went down a few decibels as he quizzed Jack, “You want some, right?”
“Gumbo?” Clearly not sold on the dish, Jack hesitated. When he sent a dubious glance my way, it automatically slid down to my legs and then back up, slowing on my breasts before hitting my face.
“My mom makes the best ever chicken gumbo,” Tristan bragged. “It has rice in it too!”
“Well…” Without breaking his gaze, Jack replied, “If your mom made it, I know it’s the best. I will have some of that.”
Although I was getting off on his stares, I knew them for what they were– a sensuous ride on the male ego. Most likely, he was appreciating what he presumed was a woman dressing up just for him.
Tonight’s phase had been initiated, executed, and it was now time to monitor and control.
“Want to eat in there?” I ladled into two bowls as I made the offer, knowing Tristan was embarrassed anytime he had to walk with crutches around someone who hadn't yet seen.
Tristan agreed, and after dropping a cooling ice-cube into his bowl, I delivered their meal to the den.
Bending at the hips while pulling in my stomach muscles had become a perfected art. As well as this posture being advised at my place of work for spine health, it was useful for bringing in bigger tips. Tonight, as I placed the bowls on the sofa table, what I hoped to achieve from the gesture was far more valuable to me than a casino chip or two.
Triumphantly, I intercepted Jack’s gaze on my backside and sweetly smiled as I ventured, “Were you planning on hanging out for a while tonight?”
Dark eyes melded with mine then dropped to his food, and he picked up the spoon. “I plan on hanging out here tonight as long as you want.”
The husky drop of his voice made the inference clear. If my phone had been conveniently in my hand, I would have swiftly canceled my devious plans of the night and then feverishly hung over him or lay under him all night.
Tristan again picked up on the change in atmosphere, silently studying the two of us as he engulfed his meal. Steeling myself against those same dark eyes in his daddy’s face, I moved on with phase one.
“Cool! I thought as long as you were here with Tristan, I would go out for a couple of hours.”
Nonchalantly, I added two cups of sweet tea to the table, remaining bent a couple of extra seconds while pretending to rub a smudge with my finger. The nervous knot in the pit of my stomach was the only thing stopping my giggle at the various incredulous looks crossing Jack’s fine face.
After the first shock faded, he seemed confused and then finally furious. “THAT’S why you're so dressed up?”
Shooting a protective look to our son, I returned, “Yes. This is not my normal gumbo getup…”
Interpreting my look toward Tristan, Jack straightened from his sprawl on the floor with the dangerous grace of a jungle cat, calmly requesting, “Can we talk a minute?”
Continuing to play my part, I flicked my eyes across the expanse of the room to the kitchen clock as I agreed. “Sure, but I only have a few min—”
My words clipped off in surprise when Jack closed strong fingers around my wrist and towed me toward the hall. With a look back into the den at Tristan, he randomly entered the first door. The venue– my bedroom– surprised him enough that he dropped my arm. Pausing, he took it all in for a few seconds– my hastily made bed with the many fluffy pillows propped on the headboard, and the dresser with a few photos of Tristan tucked into the mirror frame.
“You want me to babysit?” His brown eyes were thunderous with an emotion, which made me hot with longing, yet wary at the same time.
“No.” Carefully, I cultivated my words. “It’s not actually babysitting when he’s your child—”
“No. No! I will not ‘hang out’ here while you go out.” Sarcastically, he stressed the slang and tilted his head awaiting my response.
“Why? Jack, you’re doing fine with him.” Deliberately, I misinterpreted his adamant refusal. “You’re all he talks about lately. He’s getting around great. You won’t have to do anything except give him a teaspoon of Tylenol if he begins hurting. I’ll be gone two hours max, and will be back in time to get him to bed. And,” I reassured, pretending to misread his annoyance, “I’m only a phone call away. I know I shouldn’t ask, but it’s been so long since I’ve gone out, and the stress lately is just…” The realization that my words had escalated into a whine paused me long enough to regroup. “I need to get out for a while.” That much was true.
“Okay.”
I was nervously chipping at my metallic red nails as I awaited his next tirade, and when the response was so agreeable, my chin shot up, seeing sympathy in his eyes.
“Sure, it’s fine,” he gently reiterated. “And how about the three of us go out tomorrow night?”
♪♫¨♫♪
My head was reeling in confusion as I crossed the drive to Michael’s Volvo. Carefully, I kept to the concrete so that my heels wouldn’t sink in the grass and twist an ankle the way that my grand plan had twisted around on me tonight.
Was phase one a success? It didn’t feel that way.
Two hours later, my keys jangled as I unlocked the front door.
The dinner was enjoyable. Michael and Olivia as a couple were a blast, and Joel was everything Olivia had promised that day. However, I couldn’t keep my mind from Jack. When Joel had extended a coffee invitation, I had politely refused.
Bally met me, jumping around in a frisky four-legged greeting. Down the hallway, Jack roused from his place on the couch. Seeing me, he reached for the remote, muting the television. Seeing him heated me up in all the right places.
“Hi.” With a genuine smile at the view of him on my couch, I asked, “Did I wake you?” He said he had been channel surfing, and I wondered, “Tristan already in bed?”
“The Tylenol seemed to knock him out. He fell asleep in his chair, and I ended up carrying him to bed.”
That image inflated my heart, and in case my feelings were shining in my eyes, I dropped to the couch beside him, pretending an interest in a tv advertisement.
“Did you have a good time?” His words were soft and curious.
“Yeah. It was good to get out, thanks.” Liar. I had really wanted to stay in. With him.
He asked who I had been with, and I answered honestly. He then asked if I was seeing Joel. Each question seemed brotherly, and swallowing my disappointment, I replied, “No. Not yet anyway. This was my first time to meet him.”
“And?”
“And what?”
“What did you think?”
“About Joel?”
When his eyebrows lifted in that same mocking way Tristan’s did when having to explain himself, I almost threw myself on him. My words came out almost a whisper, “I don’t know yet.”
“Did he kiss you goodnight?”
“Why?” Now, I was incapable of anything above a whisper.
His hot brown gaze held mine helpless, and with his next words, I lost whatever phase or battle this was.
“Because. You should be.”
“Should be kissed?” I stalled. Gone was any desire to make him jealous.
“So he did,” he mused, reading me well. Even though it felt like he was looking beyond my eyes, I couldn’t shield my soul by dropping my gaze. “Must not have been that good.”
It wasn't.
Somehow, I retorted, “What makes you think that?”
“Because you wouldn’t be back here, wanting to kiss me.”
As his head tilted to mine, my heart began to thump harder than any drumbeat in any of his songs.
Initially, I was stunned he kissed me after I’d admitted to being kissed by another man minutes ago. But he seemed intent on wiping all traces of that kiss away with his own.
Stubbornly, I held back my response, not so much because I had the willpower, but because allowing him to convince me with his lips, hands, and tongue, to kiss him back resulted in a fiery feeling I had only felt with him.
I succeeded in this for less than a minute, and then my sigh mingled with his breath when I gave over to the tease of his tongue, and my fingers curved automatically into his hair.
The kiss continued, robbing me of any rational thought and sending every cell in my body screaming for more. My back hit the cushions of the couch, and his weight continued to press.
Frantically, I ripped the band from his hair, desperate to feel it between my fingers like that day in a tour bus, ages ago. My breath reduced to pants, and when his lips and tongue touched the crook of my neck, I moaned.
The thin clingy material of the dress was barely a barrier between the denim, which had grown increasingly firmer against my leg. Bringing a knee up slightly, I shifted, and feeling that movement, he did the same until his hardness cradled perfectly against my softness, and our moans into the current kiss were synonymous.
The tantalizing tunnel of his hand beneath the dress, from my knee to my thigh and almost hip, had me sucking in a startled breath. The silky strands of his hair dragged across my face as he pulled his kiss from my lips to pillage the depths of my neckline. The trace of his tongue, on the skin just beneath that loose fabric barrier, had me shifting instinctively against his jeans, seeking the relief restrained by a zipper. In this rapturous delirium, his name breathed through my lips.
Bringing us face to face again, his dilated gaze moved over mine, and our lips brushed together. Smiling and speaking against them, he rumbled, “Goodnight Mariss…”
For several stunned seconds, I lay, incredulously watching as he clipped his phone to his pocket and searched out the keys to his rental car. Dark strands of hair were wild about his face, and as if feeling my observation of them, he raked his hand through the mane, taming it only slightly.
“Wait!” Jumping up, I closed my fingers over his arm, and letting my look drop to his jeans I teased, “You can’t leave… like that…”
“It won’t be a problem.” A naughty look accompanied his assurance. “I’ll think about you. I have a good imagination and even better memory.”
The implications of those words had me flushing for so many reasons, and my rejection and dejection must have been plain on my face, because empathy replaced the evil smirk in his eyes.
“Get some sleep, okay? I know you’ve been stressed.”
“So de-stress me.” Keeping my voice light, I tried not to let the desperation show. Even though making out with Jack on the couch had not been a part of any immediate phase, I was ready to roll out a future phase and roll with him. “You owe me. Remember? Stage fright cure?”
This drew a smile, and encouraged, I bribed, “I’m wearing red…”
A couple of steps brought him closer where he hooked a finger inside the neckline of the dress enough to peer inside. Upon finding that the lingerie matched the dark dress, he only raised challenging brows.
“Well, I was hoping you would figure out the truth in a more fun way.”
It was insane that his nearness and just the barest brush of his finger on my skin could turn me into some hormonal teenager.
“That’s how you roll then? Just let people figure out the truth?” Lightly, he bantered back, his gaze holding mine a slight second.
There was a tone in his voice, and I stepped back although he was moving away.
“What?” I wondered and nervously fiddled with the bracelet cuffed on my wrist.
Remaining quiet, he grabbed his jacket from the arm of the couch, and as I watched his decorated arms slide into the sleeves, a horrible feeling stained my senses. A feeling that his light words were anything but.
“What did you mean by that?” Letting him leave without opening this can of worms was what I should have done. Yet, at the hospital, he had hinted of an issue he had with me before backing off the topic.
“Nothing, I was joking around…” Crouching, he laced up his shoes.
Dubiously, I stared, feeling on the brink of some major something in our relationship that had nothing to do with my planned phases. Was I reading too much into it? When he glanced at me again, I saw in his eyes the same fleeting shadow I had glimpsed a few times. In agitation, my arms folded across my heavy chest.
Relenting with a last tug of a shoelace, he straightened and spoke. His tone was turbulent like my feelings. “It seems like just when I feel like something is happening between us, I get mad at you all over again.”
‘Feel like something is happening between us…’
My heart thudded with happiness and then dropped to the pit of my stomach as the rest of his words sank in.
“Mad? At me?” My voice incredulously cracked.
“It’s hard not to be when you hid my son from me for almost five years.”
The accusation reeled harder than a slap, and I shouted, “I thought you would be mad if you knew! I thought you would think that I was an— an opportunist!” When his eyes remained stormy with censure, I steamrolled on, “You were so afraid of being screwed over, you required a— a sex contract!”
“That piece of paper has nothing to do with this! This is about the fact that I would’ve never known I had a son if he hadn’t needed this surgery!” His voiced rose in anger to match mine, an
d he punctuated his sentence with an aggrieved sigh.
The guilt pricked. Slipping out of the uncomfortable FM shoes was the first thing I had done upon returning home, but now I stubbornly dug self-righteous heels into his dirty charges.
“You didn’t want to know. My phone calls to you are proof of that!” The memory, of the call he had finally answered, opened a floodgate, and it all poured out. How with a few choice words and a dropped call tone in my ear, he had made me feel like trash.
“I wouldn’t have hated on you like that if you would have told me about this.” Squatting, he picked up the tiny crutches from the floor for emphasis.
“You didn’t give me a chance! And if you didn’t believe what I was telling you, about Tristan being yours, then all the rest was kind of moot wasn’t it?”
Heading to the hallway and down it, he stopped in Tristan’s room, quietly placing the walking sticks within reach of the bed. Automatically, I followed, holding back a few paces as he pulled the blankets higher over Tristan’s tiny body and brushed a gentle hand through his hair. Closing the door all but a crack, he traipsed toward me, and I led the way back to the den.
Once we were safely out of earshot of Tristan’s room, he said, “I told you already. I’m sorry about that call. You’ve got to understand, my entire life I’ve been in the limelight, in one way or another. And when you live that way, someone always wants a piece. You discover there are fewer people you can trust than those you can't. All I can do at this point is apologize and try to make it up. But you act like your part in this doesn’t even matter.”
Taunting my memories was another phone call. The one where I lay on the couch five months pregnant, longing to tell him the secret he was seeking, and fantasizing of creating a family with him– not just from him.
“I couldn’t tell you!” Shoving the words through clenched teeth, I sought to make him understand. “You are fucking famous—”
“Nothing changes the fact that I’m a father. And that I had a right to know it!”